There Was a Ship in the Sky
by Rayne-Jelly
Summary: Good story, bad summary. Novel length drama about the nature of depression and fighting a dark lord. Warnings for HarryDraco slash and Lots of Major Character Death.
1. Where it all Started

**Disclaimer: **I do not own Harry Potter, nor do I own anything associated with the Harry Potter/Warner Bros. franchise. I only own this particular dementia, and therefore am making no profit, do not sue.

**Author's Notes:** Having read some of the absolute best novel-length fanfiction out there I must admit that mine is not particularly novel, nor is it comparable to those masterpieces (go read Transfigurations by Resonant, you'll understand what I mean), but for what it's worth and the energy that went into it – it's not bad. Once you get through the first chapter or so it should get a lot better (less purple, I was cranky when I wrote it, cranky generally results in excessive adjective use) so just bear with me here.

Also, it's obviously not going to fit in with book 6, but there are no spoilers – I tried to stick to my original plan as much as possible. Funny how new canon screws everything up. So thanks very much for reading, and enjoy. (I promise, not all of my Author's Notes will be this long)

**TWASITS:** Fragments in retrograde of sensibility. The reasonable assumption that everything in life is wrong, backwards, or upside down; and therefore imagining life otherwise would be impossible. The feeling one gets when one is listening to Jefferson Airplane.

**CHAPTER 1:** Where Everything Started

There was a ship in the sky. Or at least that's what the tiny thin spot in the cloud cover looked like to Harry Potter as he searched for shapes in the grey mud. The intense August heat wave had finally broken with a magnificent storm that had thunderclouds rolling across miles of open air, lightning shocked the trees of the Forbidden Forest an electric blue before the rain put out the flames and broke lightning's hold, and the lake had over flowed with the torrential rain.

Classes had started for Harry exactly five days ago and there was a stack of homework two feet high already waiting for him on his trunk, but Harry wasn't bothered by these facts. He'd taken the night off to enjoy the wet grass and the fresh air after a long summer of being cooped up in his bedroom at Privet drive. Over the holiday he'd barely had the opportunity to stretch his too-long legs, but the boredom and loneliness of summer in no way compared to the hollow ache in his chest. Sirius was dead. He was dead at the beginning of the summer, he was dead after it, and he would be dead for all the summers to come.

Harry was trying, he was trying so very hard to bounce back from this, to be the boy that everyone was expecting him, and needing him, to be; but he hadn't been the same since Cedric Diggory's death, and he probably wouldn't recover at all from Sirius's. The funny thing was he had really begun to like Cedric.

None of that mattered now of course. In the larger scheme of things Cedric Diggory and Sirius Black would just be names in the large book of war casualties, in 100 years time they wouldn't mean a thing to anyone. Harry's would of course, he would be one of those shining names in Wizarding history, a war general and a hero, or a martyr for a lost cause, an embodiment of the ultimate act of lunacy, sacrificing his self on freedom's blood-stained altar. But that was neither here nor there; not that Harry felt he knew what was here, there, or anywhere anymore.

He hadn't been speaking lately. Vernon was amused by his silence, mocking his voiceless acquiescence and taking advantage of his stark white life. "Have you gone dumb boy? Has that… _school_ finally driven you mad?" Harry hadn't broken the silence all summer long, and even Dudley had forgotten him. True to their word, various members from the Order had popped by the suburban imprisonment to check on his health and progress; they had stopped coming eventually, he was fed, he was cared for, he was mute. He had said hello on the train, his throat rough and thick with disuse, then he'd stared out the window and fallen asleep. He knew he would have to start talking eventually, magic was a sound-based form of communication, and mute wizards were extremely unsuccessful ones, lucky if they could cast a cheering charm.

The grass rustled behind him and a pair of flat-toed, stern shoes came into view when he rolled over. "Harry," Professor McGonagall said softly, disturbing the serenity was difficult for her too. "It's late and you'll catch your death out here. Follow me inside please, the Headmaster wishes to speak with you. You can have a cup of chocolate in his office."

Harry pushed himself to his feet and hoped the disgust didn't show on his face: not everything could be solved with chocolate, in any shape or form. "Am I in trouble Professor?"

"Not as far as I know Mister Potter." She looped an arm around him and steered him towards the castle, walking heavily. Harry suddenly realized that war was hard on the old, just as it was hard on the young, the middle aged, and every conceivable age in between. But despite the efforts and intentions of all the factions within the ministry, the entire wizarding community, and Voldemort's army they were not at war yet. Subtle, incalculable guerilla strikes and not-so-covert military actions did not a war, in name, make, but not for lack of trying.

Even the Muggles had noticed strange appearances and goings on in specific communities scattered throughout their little consciousnesses. All but the most oblivious, including his esteemed relations, had noticed something odd about the world at large. They were beginning to ask questions, and the Ministry was in great fear of discovery, not to mention the answers. What _was _going on? The Muggles asked, and the wizards were equally ignorant.

The presses were not being used appropriately, as Hermione often complained in her extensive letters to him. Only the top ministry officials had been informed of Voldemort's rise to power. Those in the Order of the Phoenix knew of course, but they were few in number, too few to make a difference against a force as powerful as the Death Eaters.

In their own circles, the Death Eaters were spreading propaganda and hype, fleshing out their ranks with children as young as twelve, impressionable young sprouts with all the potential in the world and absolutely no limitations. Hermione stridently argued that 'the forces of light' should be doing the same, recruiting an army, training more proficient warriors that were all capable of making decisions. Harry got bogged down in the semantics, 'light' was such a malleable term.

"Sakuma Drops" his musing was interrupted by some form of candy he was sure as the inanimate Gargoyle named Frank slid out of the way with a distant rumbling that always reminded Harry of 'The Mummy' and 'Count Dracula.' "Ah young Harry, do come in." It was probably for the better that he was distracted now, because semantics always turned fatalist somehow.

Harry stepped into the familiar quarters, stopping to nod at some of the former Headmasters on the wall; Phinieus Nigellus Black squirmed under his gaze. "You wanted to see me Headmaster?" It wasn't a question, not really. Dumbledore _always _wanted to see Harry, and Harry never liked what he had to say; there was an ironic curse of association in that Harry was sure.

"Yes, yes of course my dear boy. Do have a seat, would you like a lemon drop?"

Dumbledore always offered lemon drops and Harry always thought of Ray Charles singing 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow' on Uncle Dursley's old tape-deck when he'd been very young. "No, thank you."

Harry hadn't bothered to ask why he was seated in front of the Headmaster at ten o'clock on a Friday night, but then, he'd never really had the chance. "I'm sure you're wondering why you're here." Harry shrugged noncommittally. "I'll be perfectly honest with you when I say that I'm not sure I should be telling you this. In fact, I'm very nearly certain I shouldn't tell you at all, but as it concerns you I should hate for the nasty shock to catch you unawares." So it was a nasty shock then, Harry wasn't surprised in the least by this.

He was, however, surprised by Dumbledore's appearance; the man was old, he was ancient, wrinkled, his eyes had sunken in and the bags under them had increased three fold, he had always been old, over one hundred and twenty at least, but tonight he looked it. He looked distinctly tired, like he could lay down and sleep for five hundred years just to put the sparkle back in his eyes, he looked like some monstrous, invisible weight was bowing him forward into his tea, making his eyelids sag and his shoulders droop; Harry feared he would drop over dead at any moment.

"I'm afraid, Harry, that Cho Chang and her family have been killed."

Harry blinked once. Twice. What was that? Had he said Cho Chang was dead? "What's it got to do with me?" For the first five years of his career here at Hogwarts, Harry had been madly, deeply, passionately, blindly in love with Cho; he saw now of course that he'd been a fickle and soppy idiot. At the end of the last year, he'd completely forgotten any romantic or even friendly feelings toward her, and for a whole week he hadn't even noticed she wasn't in Hogwarts for her final year, giggling madly with that atrocious friend of hers.

The news of her death came as a bit of a shock of course, but somehow he was emotionally unaffected, he neither felt something like the wrenching in his gut upon seeing Cedric's corpse, nor anything similar to the vast empty hole in his heart when Sirius had fallen through the veil. He felt nothing, nothing at all but a mild disgust at his lack of reaction. "Shouldn't you have told Roger Davies instead?"

Dumbledore shook his head slowly, "No Harry. I'm afraid this concerns you rather directly." Gently, the wizened old Headmaster slid an envelope with a broken wax-seal across his cherry wood desk, indicating that Harry take it, but unable to look his student in the eye as he did so.

The seal had once been a large and scrolling 'V' but had since become something more like an upside down 'A,' broken straight through the center of the deep red wax. The envelope itself was thick and creamy, unaddressed and unmarred but for the wax, the parchment inside was of equal quality and sat with the importance of a legal document in Harry's hand, far more important than a birth certificate: a writ of death. The stationary would be stunning to one with an eye for such things, the water mark extremely tasteful and subtle, the handwriting beautifully precise and elegant: the message was appalling.

_July, 31_

_Happy Birthday Harry._

_With regards from your dear Uncle Voldemort._

It wasn't written in any sort of ink Harry could identify, but it didn't need to be, because Harry knew that it wasn't written in any ink at all. "Oh. I suppose it does concern me rather directly."

Surely he would be angrier in the morning; he would react with something more than such casual indifference. He would storm up to Dumbledore's office and demand an explanation, why had no one discovered this when the owl had failed to receive conformation of Cho's acceptance of her School Letter? Why did it take you over a month to tell me about this? Why Cho, why not some nameless, faceless student? But his mind was already supplying the answers to his imagined indignation.

The owl had probably been intercepted by the death eaters, it was possible she'd never gotten it at all, or the acceptance letter had been forged; it was even possible, given the number of students to sort through each year and the encroaching war, Hogwarts had simply allowed Cho to slip through the cracks of the system.

If the Ministry had been the organization to have found Cho's family they would've hesitated a long time in asking Dumbledore for assistance, ever since the Tri-Wizard Tournament fiasco he'd not been in their good standing. It was also entirely probable that Cho's family hadn't meant to be found until now, so Cho's house was potentially covered in 'Notice-me-not's and activity spells, not to mention a few extremely powerful preservation spells. Harry winced, with a heatwave like that, a preservation spell would've been necessary just to knock out the smell. Besides, it wasn't Harry's _right _to know about this letter, it was a merciful precaution taken by Dumbledore to be sure it wouldn't be flung at him as new ammunition in the shit war he constantly found himself in.

The Death Eaters had chosen Cho not because she was a brilliant student, nor because her father was a squib, they hadn't even chosen her because she won an award in Muggle Studies, the plaque was still in the trophy room. They'd chosen her because in the February 15th back order of the Daily Prophet was a picture of Cho and Harry having coffee together in Madame Puddifoots, the headline reading 'Most Eligible Bachelor?" Two days later Cho had begun dating Roger Davies, and there was a small follow up to the story on the eighth page of the February 17th issue. Harry wanted to whine and cry because this was his fault, he wanted to kick and scream and do a lot of things, but he felt no urge to do anything but sit in silence for a bit.

Voldemort really was a bastard.

"Thank you for letting me know about this Professor Dumbledore." Harry said evenly while standing, "May I be excused? I think I'd like to go to bed now."

"Certainly Harry." Dumbledore said kindly, gazing up with a certain sad fondness at the young man before him. "But Harry… that letter…"

"I think I'd like to keep it if you don't mind. It was addressed to me."

Dumbledore looked blank for a moment, the closest thing to shock Harry had ever seen on his craggy face. "I suppose that would be alright." He said finally, "sleep well Harry. And please be discreet about to whom you give this information."

"Of course Professor."

"Until tomorrow then."

Harry wandered through the halls of Hogwarts. Everything was blue and grey, the gilded frames of the portraits appeared black in the stale light, the torches had been blown out. His feet led him to the Gryffindor common where his friends had been waiting for him, they looked anxious, staring at him like he'd explode into a million pieces at any moment and they would receive detentions for the rest of their lives. Hermione's hair, which had been frizzy and standoffish nearly all summer long, had amassed into and exceptionally large afro in the humidity; despite his best efforts not to, Harry found this amusing. "I've just been to see the Headmaster." He said softly, startling them.

"Is… everything all right?" It was just like Hermione to put X and Y together without actually knowing the values of either, Ron simply looked grim.

Harry shrugged and handed her the envelope, 'no, rather, as Cho Chang is dead,' didn't seem appropriate, but he said it anyway. Hermione gasped, then screamed as she opened the letter. Ron gaped like a fish out of water for a long moment, he then looked livid until his features settled into something resembling sympathy, "We'll get the bastards back for this." He said gravely, hands clenched into fists and voice very carefully controlled, as if he were going to bellow in outrage.

Harry marveled at this, how could Ron and Hermione be so deeply upset when he felt no worse than when he saw a dead bird in the back yard when he was seven? He had knelt down to dig and place the wretched thing in a grave, just as he was leaning now to retrieve the letter Hermione had dropped, then he shrugged and went back to pulling dandelions. "I think I'll go for a walk."

Harry found himself standing in the boys bathroom without quite knowing how he'd got there, the white tile floor was cool against his bare feet, the toilets and shower stalls freshly cleaned. Harry couldn't decide if he was so confused in such a jumble of different emotions that he felt blank, or if he was sincerely blank and his confusion stemmed from his non-sequitur attitude about all of this.

The toilets in the stalls were bleached porcelain, cold, sterile and impersonal – he found himself throwing up into the third one on the right. In the back of his head, a voice that sounded remarkably like Draco Malfoy's said in a mock barter "Here we have a toilet in which the Boy-Who-Should-Have-Died threw up, with the vomit still inside. We'll start the bidding at five galleons, yes you heard me it's a bargain. Five galleons from the lady on the right, SIX from the Weasleys down the first row, your entire life savings isn't it? Seven from the lady on the right. New bidder ladies and gentlemen Eight from the Minister of Magic himself, Nine from the… Your Majesty! … final bid, Twenty-two galleons to My Lord Voldemort himself, enjoy your purchase." Harry flushed to spite the bastard. Prat.

Later that night, while Harry's dorm mates snored all around him, Harry found himself wondering precisely _how_ Ron intended to 'get' the Death Eaters that had killed Cho Chang and her family when he couldn't look Snape straight in the eye. Well, he didn't suppose it mattered so long as it made him feel better about himself. But then, nothing mattered, because he was asleep too.

* * *

Harry dreamt that he was the only human on the Quidditch pitch and the entire field had been over run by snowmen. All of them were staring at Harry with their multicolored coal black eyes, all of them were somehow different, people Harry knew, but whenever he approached one its features became obscured, gently melting in the hot sun. There were puddles all around him, with coal, carrots, and cloves floating in them, and he knew they had once been snowmen, but he didn't know who they were. "Hello?" Harry called, and got silence in response, "is there anybody out there?"

* * *

The student body had been informed just that morning, ten minutes before classes began. There would be a wizarding-world-wide moment of silence held at precisely 1:47 that afternoon, Harry didn't know why; Cho Chang's family had been tortured then killed at precisely midnight – Voldemort wouldn't have bothered to set up a ritual slaughter complete with messages written in blood to have done it at 1:47am, that wouldn't have made the least bit of sense. The 'moment of silence' should've been held at Greenwich meantime midnight, but one couldn't have everything and the Ministry wanted to move past this tragedy. They had, after all, used it as an excuse to officially declare war.

Harry hadn't gone to breakfast that morning, it taken a great deal of difficulty to peel himself out of bed because his sheets were unusually soft and comfortable and the air around him bone chilling. He woke with a weight in his heart that was threatening to crush his spine but he forced himself to roll out of bed anyway, he didn't remember any of the things he dreamt, but he knew they were sad.

The rain had let up, and it was startlingly inappropriate. Roger Davies had red eyes, all of Hufflepuff was wearing black and yellow arm bands for Cedric, and the Ravenclaws' were blue and black. The whole school would be wearing their individual shades of mourning, they just didn't know it yet, Harry knew it of course, he knew it like an ant knows the beam from the magnifying glass is mere millimeters from burning it to a cinder. He wore all sorts of black everyday, black that was orange, red, blue, green, gray, purple, gold, black in every available color.

* * *

TBC of course.

If you find you've already read this - I'm sorry. I had to fix a few things, and insert some page breaks that I didn't realize wouldn't show up. If you HAVE already read this - this time, review.


	2. History

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. In laymens, I dunnae own it, I'm fessing up, you no sue.

**Notes:** Right – I couldn't resist posting another one, again hoping to be inspired by the warm welcome. … all sarcasm aside I've only proved that I have no self discipline and that should come as no surprise. A very special thank you to Moose on Mars, my wonderful (and sole) reviewer. At least somebody read the bloody thing.

* * *

**Chapter 2: History**

"Ladies and gentlemen, we will be observing a moment of silence in honor of our missing students and their families. Please, for exactly sixty seconds I expect you all to maintain perfect silence." Binns's reedy voice sliced through the self absorbed fog that lingered on his student's minds with all the efficiency of a dull steak knife through stone. Not that this particular stone needed to be cut because the sixth year students currently occupying the History classroom couldn't be quieter if they were dead.

Two of the Gryffindor's were valiantly holding back sniffles, their dear dear friend Cho Chang, whom they'd spent all of twenty minutes with was dead, what cause for grief and utter devastation. The Ravenclaws, however, were truly upset over the death of their dear prefect, she was going to be Headgirl this year, before she died, she sent a letter to Roger because she was so excited about her knew authoritative position; Roger had told the whole sob story to his housemates when he'd learned of her death the day before yesterday. The whole school had been flabbergasted. They hadn't seen any evidence of Voldemort, they knew logically that Voldemort was back in force, but the fear hadn't settled into the hearts of the young. It hadn't been needling them, eating away at the lining of their stomachs, keeping them from sleep and slowly killing them from the inside out. Until now. Now that the Changs were dead, the students and the faculty were feeling it more strongly than ever before.

There was yet to be the numb retaliation from the government, Cornelius's speech had gone something like 'There must be retribution for this tragedy, it must not go unmarked. Voldemort has been in power for far too long and it is our duty as Wizards, as British citizens, and as Humans to bring him down. Ladies and gentlemen: we are at war." It was amazingly dramatic, but ultimately useless. Minister Fudge had played the wrong hand and his entire administration was taking the blows, pamphlets on self-protection circulated across the country, no one had the courage to leave the house alone: taxes were at an all time high. The war was a disaster.

The silence had become official now, for once in their lives the students gave their full attention to Professor Binns as an oppressive hush fell over the whole school and surrounding country. When it was over, no one felt changed, they didn't feel at all better about Cho's death, or Cedric's death, or the deaths to come, only more accustomed to the moments of silence that would rule their lives for the next year. Roger Davies collapsed on his desk with a great sob. "He must have really loved her." Said Parvati Patil, sympathetically patting his back as she whispered in Lavender Brown's ear. Harry Potter rolled his eyes and remained silent.

Harry was the last person to leave the History classroom, everyone else had gone to discuss the scintillating news, write letters to their families, and perhaps have personal wakes to celebrate the death of the Changs: human funeral rites were a morbid parade, everyone knew this. Ron and Hermione had gone ahead, talking lowly about something riveting Harry was sure; in fact, they were probably muttering about him. Why oh why wasn't their dear Harry more upset, how could he possibly be so cold? Harry wasn't cold, he was upset, he was shocked, he was angry: at himself. He'd given up on wallowing in guilt and self pity, without which he didn't know where he stood, so he fell over. "Watch where you're walking Potter." Of course, the foot that was thrust in front of him didn't help him keep his balance either.

"Malfoy, don't be a prat, you know as well as I that if I ever watched where I was going, your daily entertainment value would decrease by forty-five percent." He didn't question why Malfoy was there, it was just a thing of nature for Draco Malfoy to be where Harry Potter least wanted him to be.

"You're probably right Potter, what amazing luck that on top of being an utter git, you're myopic and clumsy."

Harry pushed himself to his feet and bit back a growl, "Well, I am what I am." He said tensely, and so he was, but that was a conversation for another day. "What do you want, Malfoy?"

"Nothing much. Just a chat Potter." It was said with indifference as Malfoy leaned against the wall. Last year's final confrontation had ended rather poorly for him, and Malfoy would be adding 'giant slug' to the list of things he was adamantly opposed to becoming again. Hopefully, by keeping such altercations private he would finally come out on top against Potter, who seemed to flourish all the more for his public humiliation. "I heard a rumor that you'd killed Cho Chang and was hoping you'd verify it as fact for me." Harry flushed crimson, Malfoy was reminded of the time he'd held their house elf's face in the punch bowl at his seventh birthday; pomegranate juice stained green skin a fascinating color.

"Not that it's any of your information," Harry began tightly, fists clenched at his side, "but no. I didn't kill her, Voldemort did." It occurred to Harry then, that he seemed to have a surplus in evil uncles, both genetic and self appointed. It was a mathematical anomaly really; generally it was only one evil aunt, uncle, or fairy to a child. Not that Vernon Dursley could be considered _evil _per se, nor Voldemort a fairy; but the Dursleys did rather resemble Sponge and Spider from James and the Giant Peach, and Voldemort the Wicked Witch of the West.

Malfoy nodded imperiously, like all the secrets in the world were locked inside his head and he wanted nothing more than to taunt you with them until you were ready to beat them out. "Really though, when you think about it, you were probably the reason she died. After all, what would Voldemort want with Cho Chang when his target audiences are Mudbloods and Muggle sympathizers?" He shrugged, "To think that Wee Potty Potter is responsible for another death. What will the papers say?"

Harry threw another log on the fire, "You know Malfoy, you probably had more to do with Cho's death than I did. For all I know yours might have been the wand that killed her. Voldemort just uses me as an excuse to find targets and I'll admit that it's rather distracting; if his darling followers want to pin the blame on me that's just fine, all sycophants are entitled to blind acts of stupidity. Or are you claiming to be more than a toady, what _does _he use you for?" Harry tsked, oddly satisfied.

Malfoy's eyes narrowed and he unconsciously bared his teeth, coiling to strike; but just then Hermione, with her large and embarrassing hair, rounded the corner to glare at Harry. "I've been looking all over for you." She huffed, completely ignoring Malfoy, "You're going to be late to Charms, let's go!" Hermione dragged him away before their conversation could become childish, violent, or worse: both. Malfoy, however, walked casually into class, smoothing his rumpled feathers while noting one crucial thing: Potter had changed.

"Harry, were you fighting with Malfoy again?" her grip on his wrist strongly resembled that of Aunt Petunia's, firm, unrelenting, frantic. "You know that you'll just land yourselves both in detention, Harry if you keep these scuffles up I wouldn't be surprised if you were expelled!"

Yes, to Hermione expulsion was still the end of the world, but he was Harry Potter, spoiled in the extreme by fortune and the Headmaster; he certainly wasn't worried about a petty lowlife like Malfoy. "That depends on how you define fighting." Harry tried in his defense, Hermione always made him feel like a six-year-old.

"For the love of Pete, Harry, I hate to sound like Ron, but it's _Malfoy. _Do you two do anything _but _fight? They put you in detention nearly every time you're in the same room, and starting something now isn't smart because you'll have to finish it in Care of Magical Creatures, and you _know _how bad people are with dealing with Malfoy. Malfoy will only accuse them of favoritism." This all flew out of her mouth in one massive breath as she needlessly hauled him along; Harry's long legs occasionally had to lope after her at a half-run to keep up with her Super-Efficient-Power-Walk, she must have acquired it over the summer, because ordinarily she would have run. Harry marveled at her ability to violently gesture with both hands while somehow still managing to drag him through the halls.

"So, are you proposing that I just go to McGonagall and _ask _for a detention? Preemptive strike and all that?" Maybe it was the joke, or maybe it was that they arrived to Charms well on time, but Hermione smiled around her violently flushed complexion.

* * *

Harry got detention. He didn't even have the decency to wait until Care of Magical Creatures and prove Hermione right, because he and Draco Malfoy had shown up at the exact same time for lunch, and they'd happened to knock into each other. Harry hadn't forgotten the conversation after History, and he didn't think he'd ever forget the implication that he'd killed Cho; granted, he'd considered the possibility in the three days since he'd learned of her death, but he never thought someone would share the opinion. Malfoy hadn't forgotten it either, and while Harry had known what he was saying, he hadn't thought that Malfoy would care or care to remember. So, as he was wont to do, he found himself verbally and physically brawling with Malfoy in the Great Hall; which came as no surprise to any party at the scene; and that was how he came to be pruning roses in Greenhouse four next to Malfoy.

Harry loved roses, they smelled lovely, they looked quite nice around the front porch of Number 4 Privet Drive, and they held an air of magic and mystery that echoed through history as war symbols and quotes, and metaphors for everything from corpses to canyons. But more than he loved roses, Harry hated them. He hated them with a passion. He hated the horrible sunburns he got while tending them in Petunia's garden, which was really his garden in everything but name and gloating rights, he hated their tendency to attract bees that stung him whenever he was forced outside by his uncle, he hated their thorns, especially when Dudley pushed him into the large rose bush near the corner of the porch where he'd carried a bruise on his hip for three weeks. He despised everything associated with roses, just as he would loathe them for Malfoy, because Malfoy was gloating at him with a pair of pruning shears in hand while refusing to work.

Harry wondered at the genius of the situation, locking the two worst stone-throwers in history, together, unsupervised, in a glass house, with pruning shears. Maybe Professor Dumbledore was hoping they'd come to their senses and not kill each other, or maybe they'd be too frightened of the consequences to try. Of course, Harry was sincerely wondering why Malfoy didn't just take his shears and try to slit his throat. Probably because it would be too undignified for a Malfoy to try; staining his almost-too-expensive robes with blood would never do. Harry didn't, however, wonder at why he didn't try it. The simple truth of the matter was that he didn't care enough to want to gut Malfoy, it was easier just to do the job assigned him without complaint.

Harry hissed when the soft flesh of his arm came into vicious contact with a rose thorn, knowing that it would itch for days and being absolutely helpless at stopping it. McGonagall had chosen her punishment carefully and wisely, this was a task that was delicate, it took time, patience, caution, and a certain amount of concentration that scrubbing a bathroom floor simply didn't require. Harry was also quite confident that if her roses got ruined, Helena Sprout would have no compunctions about using their mutilated bodies as fertilizer for the next generation of the horrendous plants.

"All right there Potter?" Malfoy asked snidely, amazingly content in his role of watching while Harry worked. It was entirely too amusing that the 'savior' of the free world was doing house work, amusing and strangely gratifying.

Harry thought it was a strange question, if Malfoy was being sarcastic and wasn't at all concerned for his well being, which he clearly wasn't, he should have said something like 'Don't hurt yourself Potter.' Not that Malfoy probably gave a damn about semantics. "Not at all Malfoy." Harry returned dryly. He very pointedly did not wish to converse.

"I always knew you were meant for servitude."

Harry didn't wish to exploit the irony of that statement, he was potting roses, Malfoy was kissing the hem of a geriatric corpse's robe. Servitude indeed. "It would go faster if you helped a bit."

"Why should I wish for this to go faster? I could curl up here and take a lovely nap, and you'd still do all the work because you're too pathetic to say 'bugger off.'"

"Bugger off, Malfoy." Harry viciously snipped off a sickly branch, "if you're not going to do anything, then go away." Harry stopped listening then and went back to the roses; suddenly his name felt like a horrible coincidence as he was in fact potting a young rose bush. He was destined to do these sorts of things for the rest of his life wasn't he? Grunt work like potting roses and killing bad guys, it was messy and tiring. Like there was a line of Death Eaters waiting to be killed and buried instead of a line of rose bushes waiting to be pruned and re-potted; Harry sighed, he really hated roses.

Malfoy squirmed. Watching Potter work was heaven for the first fifteen minutes, amusing for the second, and absolutely horrendous for the next two hours. It was fine for momentary purposes, but consoling himself with the thought that he was quite possibly the only person in the world who had seen Harry Potter do manual labor with the ability to fully appreciate it could only last so long. The truth was that Malfoy was irritated with Potter's ability to ignore him, he was Draco Malfoy, and had never been ignored. He was constantly stimulated as a child, toys and friends were lavished upon him like he was the heir to the world, and in a way he was. Quite simply, Draco had never been bored, and was incapable of amusing himself. Potter was so engrossed in his work, Draco felt as if he wasn't there at all, and it was frustrating him immensely, so he slid off the counter top that his rear was currently occupying and looked distastefully at the roses in front of him.

Draco had been working for nearly thirty minutes before Harry finally spoke up. "Sorry about your tooth," he said; Draco grimaced.

Madam Pomfrey had seen them both in the hospital wing during Care of Magical Creatures and hadn't let them out until it was long over. She'd been forced to re-set Harry's nose and clear out a concussion, and she'd fixed Draco's cracked rib with minimal trouble, but re-rooting Draco's loose tooth had caused him a full five minutes of pain. Harry didn't like causing people pain, never mind that it was gratifying as hell to punch Malfoy's teeth in, but he'd been made to sit and watch the extremely bloody process while Malfoy squirmed and thrashed. Professor Dumbledore had asked her to leave the bruises and minor scrapes in place. "No you're not."

Harry shrugged, Malfoy could think whatever he liked, especially given that Harry was currently suffering from a rather painful black eye, swollen nose, and extremely bruised torso, but he _did _feel mildly guilty about the tooth. Dudley had once knocked one of his teeth out. Fortunately it was a baby tooth, but Harry was convinced his jaw was broken it hurt so bad, the nerves were still intact when it got ripped out and Harry had to squish his toes up in his over-large trainers to keep from crying behind the school trash cans. Vernon handed him a bag of ice and told him to stay in the closet 'You provoked him, you deserve everything you got and more, leave my Duddykins alone.'

"Sorry about your nose."

"No you're not." Malfoy grinned wolfishly, then winced as his bruised and swollen mouth was stretched unpleasantly. Harry smiled to himself, and they worked in silence until dawn.

PAGEBREAK

A/N: You have reached the End of Chapter 2, very weird actually, first confrontation with Malfoy obviously. It's a bit sad at that – not my favorite bit of dialogue. Interesting to note however that as I was re-reading the books (in preparation for Book 6 of course), I noticed that in the first book Draco's name popped up more often than Ron's.

I realize reading back through these first chapters that they're BLOODY SHORT! I'm making amends shortly (no pun intended).


	3. Hermione's Priorities

**Disclaimer: **If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times, but once again for the record: I do not own Harry Potter. This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

….but my birthday's coming up.

**Notes: **I more-or-less like this chapter. I've given up on liking the story itself because I tend to be picky and very hyper-critical of anything (I write). I do however like most of the component parts (if that makes any sense, which it shouldn't) and therefore I continue on with this travesty for said component parts.

Thank you Saber.Shadowkitten for reviewing: I really appreciated it. laughs Would you hate me if I told you I started this whole thing simply because I wanted to kill Cho?

* * *

**Chapter 3: Hermione's Priorities**

Harry yawned mightily and his jaw cracked. It was a Hogsmeade weekend, the first one of the year, and while he could nip down to the village any time he felt like it, authorized trips were always so refreshing. He was exhausted, it was the last weekend in September, and he'd had more school work than he could ever remember, Hermione didn't help by constantly muttering about NEWTs, which would have Ron muttering back 'but they're a YEAR away!' It was her goal in life, Harry supposed, to make them as enthusiastic about school work and good grades as she was. Harry just didn't share her ardent passion for it, he was awful at research and highly adverse to dust.

Everyone at school had forgotten about Cho Chang it seemed, everyone but Roger of course. Less than a month after her death had been announced and the students were already looking for new media. Every detail Dumbledore had given them had been subjected to the gossip churn time and time again, building rumor upon insensitive rumor. 'I say it was Draco Malfoy, he's had it in for her since she beat him at Quidditch two years ago.' 'Well of course it was You-Know-Who you dimwit, if Malfoy had killed her he wouldn't have offed the whole family. He's not _that bad a seeker._' Harry was somewhat grateful for the reprieve, it was a widely known fact that he had a crush on her, and if he had to sit through one more sympathetic look from Hannah Abbot he would yank her braids off and damn the consequences.

Roger Davies had passed him in the hall yesterday and glared like Harry was the antichrist. His eyes were still red and Harry was worried he was getting sick with something other than grief.

Lavender Brown exclaimed over the state of his wardrobe as he plodded down the stairs, "Harry." She said firmly, taking him by the elbow, "I've seen better dressed homeless fellows, go buy yourself a decent pair of slacks." Harry hadn't noticed nor particularly cared, but if even Lavender, the most self-absorbed witch of her year, noticed then he would have to make a change somehow. He wouldn't have known where to begin buying slacks, but he was, in fact, not-so-pleasantly surprised to find that his current pair of jeans were still too large about the waist and short on the legs. He would have to ask Hermione her opinion; she usually had one.

It was cool outside, but still hot enough for Ice Mice and chilled butterbeer. Harry's candy-enchanted teeth chattered as he conversed with Ron about positively nothing. Weasley Wizard Wheezes was opening up a new branch in an offshoot of Hogsmeade, they could get summer jobs there. Ethel Pinwinkle, having never bought a lottery ticket in her life had more an opportunity to win the 6 at Six than the Chudley Cannons had of making it to the World Cup. Ron was very carefully considering asking a cute fifth year (who's name Harry had missed) out for coffee, despite the disgusting fact that she was a Slytherin. And quite clearly the world had upended itself because Malfoy thought he had a ghost of a chance at the house cup. Harry wished that all of his conversations could be this easy and light hearted.

He wondered what life would be like in the future, would he and Ron still be able to sit on the fountain outside Glad Rags while Hermione went in search of an outfit that was neither here nor there ('Oh really boys, you'll survive! I just want something to wear that isn't Muggle and isn't a school uniform!') and talk about meaningless things? Or would every conversation of theirs turn to business as it so often did, who was Nicholas Flammel, why is it opposed to mirrors, how many Death Eaters does it take to screw in a light bulb? "Harry mate, are you alright?"

"Hmm? Oh yeah, I'm fine." His bottled butterbeer had lost the vast majority of its fizz and was now nothing more than a particularly sweet liquid that tasted vaguely of pound-cake.

"It's not your scar is it?"

Harry decided that Ron had been spending entirely too much time with Hermione if he was asking questions like _that, _but he indulged his best friend by momentarily focusing on the damned thing anyway. Nothing, not even the faintest twinge, save the usual pull he felt, this time somewhere from the South East. "No. My scar is fine, I haven't felt the slightest thing all month long. Was I drifting off again?"

"You looked as dazed as Trelawney for a minute there mate, you sure you're okay?"

Harry gaped in mock indignation, "Trelawney!" He threw his hands into the air, gesturing broadly, "Oh, Mister Potter, I foresee death in your future! You will be, oh no, it is sad and tragic I must not go on! But if you insist, you will ironically be staked through the heart by a Vampire on Halloween! You must wear garlic with you, everywhere!" Finally he fell over into Ron's lap while Ron giggled madly.

"Being staked would kill anyone." He finally answered, still chuckling.

"So too would being run over by a lorry.1" Hermione said curtly, emerging from Glad Rags with a heavy looking bag and an open book in her hand. "Now what's this about garlic?"

* * *

"Muggles are Tortured and Killed in Knockturn Alley"

Read the front page of the Daily Prophet in large, bold letters. Hermione gasped when she saw it at breakfast and immediately began devouring the article, ravenous for information. "Last night, at approximately midnight" she read aloud, "the Dark Mark was raised in the sky. Aurors rushed to the scene where they discovered a Muggle family of four, dead in the street. The Muggles were beaten and tortured before they were killed, while the Ministry is not giving out any statements on the incident eye witnesses claim that this travesty was the work of Death Eaters. The appearance of the Dark Mark supports this claim."

The remainder of the article, explained in detail how the Ministry was to blame the Muggle deaths on a Muggle serial killer and what to do if you were to spot Voldemort or a group of Death Eaters. Harry thought it was the funniest thing he'd ever read, when people encountered the Dark Lord they ran screaming for their lives, wet their pants, or bowed before him, they most certainly did not think to contact the nearest Auror base and they invariably did not stay calm. It probably wasn't the appropriate time for a giggle, but Harry couldn't help himself, Hermione glared at him. "Don't you know what this means?" she hissed angrily.

"Yes," Said Harry unrepentantly. He knew what it meant. If the Ministry declared war when the Changs died, Voldemort's forces were just retaliating against targets that couldn't defend themselves. It was psychological warfare meant to make Dumbledore, and in turn Harry, feel guilty about simply existing. _"You got these people involved for fighting for their protection"_ he was trying to say _"the blood is on your hands. We are just trying to give Wizards rights!" _Harry could see it, see the necessity of Voldemort's actions, see the pathology behind him. It didn't disgust him or frighten him anymore, it intrigued him, he could think _"he used to be just like me"_ without the obligatory mental outrage because Harry had changed. Harry was what he was because of Tom, and Tom was what he was because of a series of circumstances that happened to bend him over a barrel. Harry felt sorry for him, but he wouldn't forgive him.

"Harry! It means that Hogsmeade visits will be canceled, it means that you won't be able to do any of that late night wandering you and Ron like so much, Harry, it _means _that the teachers have an excuse to keep us from getting us involved!"

Harry hadn't considered that, but he supposed it was right, Hermione was usually right. He also realized that Hermione had turned into a girl, it wasn't like her to worry about something as petty as a Hogsmeade visit when lives were on the line, and it _CERTAINLY_ wasn't like her to worry for Harry's wandering; he wondered if she had ulterior motives. What was Hermione up to these days anyhow? He felt like he hadn't spoken to her in years, like she was some distant stranger that he was only mildly acquainted with, like Ernie, or Stan from the Knight Bus. She'd changed physically in his mental-absence, or was that self absorbance? Her hair wasn't as bushy, her eyes had changed color, she was taller, she'd grown breasts: Harry was looking at someone he didn't know a damned thing about. "Oh." He said.

Hermione always wanted to be involved, she was always sticking her button-nose where it was most likely to get chopped off but she did it anyway because she was Hermione. That was one constant about this ever-changing girl, one Harry had noticed the first time he'd met her, she wanted her fingers in all the pies and she was just smart enough to have it done. He wasn't regretting the loss. Every year he managed to get mixed up in trouble that was just fine without him and this time around he'd finally learned his lesson, he wasn't going to stick his nose in it this time. Every time he did someone else got hurt and he was fed up with blaming himself. Sirius' death had hit him hard, harder still because it really WAS his fault. It was a noble thing to say _"Everything is my fault, I take full responsibility for the things that occurred here tonight" _but when the shit hit the fan it was always worse when your own came raining down on you.

In their second year, when the teachers had banned students from wandering, he and Ron had found it most unjust. Their inability to discover the secret crimes of Tom Marvolo Riddle was driving them mad, particularly after the acromantula incident, but these days Harry thought he would be just as happy being oblivious. Yes, he knew there was something wrong in the world – in some ways he would always know, he would always be able to feel it. But for once in his life he did not want to be involved, in fact he was ardently opposed to the idea. He knew what would happen this time, and he just wasn't willing to leap out of the pan and into the fire.

Ron was waving a hand in his face, it was blurry, large, and sticklike; not unlike the spiders that Ron feared so much, but that was irrelevant. Wasn't everything? "Hmm?"

"Harry mate? You still with us? Divination starts in ten minutes."

Harry looked around and blinked. The paper was still in front of him, the porridge was grey and congealed, the Gryffindor table was nearly empty, Hermione was running out the south exit towards her Arithmancy class, and the rest of the students were filtering out at a more normal pace. He had been fading in and out of reality more and more, his brain spent more time processing than it did participating in the world. Harry figured that he'd either short circuited it over the summer, or his subconscious was trying to deal with something so large and complicated it had slowed his thought process to a crawl. It was impossible to tell really. "Guess we'd better go then." Maybe his brain was slowly dying and Ron kept bringing it back, defibrillator ready? Clear! Harry mate? Clear! Harry you still in there? "No." Harry muttered, he wasn't.

"What was that mate?"

"Nothing. Suppose Trelawney will see my death in the sunflower seeds today? 'Oh, young Harry, I… I foresee you growing roots! Oh you'll be buried!" Ron giggled.

* * *

Hermione sighed in relief, she'd had to go to the bathroom since before breakfast, but Ron hadn't left her side all morning. Never in her years at Hogwarts had she excused herself to pee and she wasn't about to start; it seemed somehow beneath her. It may have been an odd rule, but it was one that she would stand to until all of her walls came tumbling down, she fought hard enough against being a troll that she wouldn't ruin it with something this trivial. Or maybe because it was trivial she thought she could control it. Investigating the meanings behind her personal quirks had caused her many a headache and proved ultimately futile, so Hermione had tried to stop trying.

It was easier said than done when one had a brain that absolutely refused to shut itself off; at sixteen years old she was dependent on sleeping spells and potions to keep her unconscious for long enough that it be called sleep. Hermione did what she had to do, because she had to and no one else would. She took care of who she had to take care of, she worked because she had to work, she performed admirably in every possible situation including social ones, and she never looked back. Her nights weren't spent asking 'what if' and 'why' they were spent worrying that she wouldn't wake up in the morning, they were spent asking things like 'how.' How am I going to survive tomorrow when no one really realizes what I'm doing. She quite often felt like she was holding a box she couldn't move; she was bearing it aloft, she was standing like a rock, unable to drop her burden but unable to move it, unable to alter it in any way no matter what she tried. She was stuck, like a keystone, stuck with her box of rocks but she couldn't stay still; keep moving keep trying, keep moving and maybe you won't sink in the mud you're rooted to. She hated it. Of course she hated it, of course she resented her role of mother, of course she wanted to be someone else entirely. But she was who she was. She did what she had to do.

There was sniffling coming from the fourth stall, the one nearest the wall. Hermione was confused, she thought she was the only one that ever used Moaning Myrtle's bathroom, possibly because she was friends with Harry, possibly because she came here to moan herself. "Myrtle?" she called.

"Go away!" The girl behind the door yelled back before coughing violently. Hermione blinked in concern, that wasn't Myrtle, that was an older voice, and a voice that sounded like it had done a lot of hard crying lately.

"Are you okay?"

"Leave me the hell alone alright!"

No, it wasn't all right, Hermione was curious now, and she was concerned, which was a combination that had violently compelled the starchiest personalities and the most prideful people to fold under her iron will. Besides, the door was unlatched, and it was inviting trouble from her. "Marjorie, what's wrong?"

"Go away Hermione." Marjorie Durham sat three seats away from Hermione in Arithmancy, she was a quiet, intelligent girl and somewhat of an anomaly for a Hufflepuff. Currently, Marjorie Durham was kneeling on the floor of a girl's stall, looking an odd combination of flushed and green, she was sweating, and probably running a fever. As she started retching into the bowl again, Hermione gently smoothed her hair back with her own, sensible fingertips and cast a mild cooling charm. "Get away from me Granger!" Marjorie shouted when she emerged for air, she looked like she wanted to throw a flower vase, but as there was no flower vase to be thrown, and as she barely had the energy to lift her hands, she settled for glaring fiercely.

It was less than effective, but Hermione backed off and gave the girl her pride, "Okay Marge." She said, "but if you ever need help you can always ask me for it."

"Get stuffed!" Marjorie replied, and suddenly Hermione had another reluctant charge, she sighed and headed to dinner.

* * *

**Post Notes: 1 **Okay, I've resisted thus far from commenting on any specific aspect of this story, but I absolutely must inform in this instance. That line was blatant thievery on my part (and I thought I'd mention it because I don't like to steal from incredible authors), it was from a story called _Rats' Alley_ by Fabula Rasa, one of the best fics I've ever read. Absolutely amazing. So go read it, it can be found at www. restrictedsection. org. 


	4. The Synergy of Strange

**Disclaimer: **This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. Now leave me alone so I can pout in the corner.

**Author's Notes:** I'm stuck laughs I'm so close to finishing this thing that I don't know what to do with myself – how to bridge the gap between the build-up and the climax so-to-speak. I'm doing a lot of build up right now actually, you'll start to see a plot develop eventually, but it takes a long time and I'm… setting the scene in the only way I know how.

Unfortunately (this is serious) because I've been stuck, I have been wandering around various forums and reading all of the Harry/Draco fanfiction that my nimble little fingers can reach. The other night I went and read "A Spark" by AbbyCadabra, which is an incredible story, you can find it at the Bottom!Draco emporium, or at RestrictedSection, it's violent, it's sexy… I've read it before. I think I read it when it first came out, ages and ages ago, long before I started writing this, so long ago that I'd completely forgotten I'd read it until I re-read it and noticed something awful. The Second Chapter of Twasits (I.E: History) is actually very similar during the detention scene. I didn't realize I'd modeled that detention scene after "A Spark" until I went back and read the story again – but it's left me questioning everything about what I write, is anything original or is it just the things I've read going over and over in my mind and emerging slightly differently as a re-hashed version of the original? And remixes are never any good.

I would just like to apologize to AbbyCadabra, I would never ever do something like that on purpose and I know it's unforgivable but I swear I didn't know I'd done it until two days ago. I realize there are only so many options you can achieve in any fiction, and only so many story lines you can follow, but those were unacceptable similarities and I could just about die of shame. If anyone else recognizes something in my story from something they've read, or something they've written, please mention it, if I've read it I'll make a public apology to the author, and if it does occur I'm scrapping this project – my profound apologies to all of you. …I'm also sorry, this has been an obscenely long author's note.

* * *

**Chapter 4:** The Synergy of Strange

In the absolute privacy of his heavily warded bed curtains, Draco Malfoy smiled toothily before he even opened his eyes. It was the first of October, the glorious, fantastic beginning of Quidditch season. He was captain of course, after that oaf Marcus had graduated there wasn't a single player with enough brains for the job, Umbridge had made damned sure of that by 'permanently' expelling people from the team. Naturally he expected Dumbledore to counteract all of her decrees, and was unhappy for the authoritative action saving only those that directly benefited him.

He would need a new Keeper of course, and two new chasers, but the information, instead of discouraging him, was delightful. Flint had been an excellent Keeper, but that's all he was good for, strategy and decent judgment were beyond him. His chasers had been brutes, stupid and incapable of individual thought, more like beaters than anything else; he would change that this year.

Malfoy stepped into expensive grey slacks and tucked in a loose white dress shirt before pulling his robes over his shoulders. His hair was naturally rumpled from sleep, but that was quickly fixed by a delicate little charm his father had taught him, and just a drop of hair gel. At birth his teeth had a stay-clean charm placed on them, Draco had never suffered a cavity, never a painful toothache: of course, he never would have had those things anyway. He was a Malfoy, and Malfoy's just did not complain of tooth pain, flossing or no.

Breakfast was spread out and waiting for him when he came up the stairs from the dungeon. Salazar Slytherin probably had a decent reason for putting the Slytherin dorms in the dungeon, he probably had myriad escape routes carved into the living stone, but they were all closed now and the students of his esteemed house were trapped like rats in a hole. They were the only house, that had to walk _up_ stairs to get to anything, everyone else had towers and flats; it was infuriating.

Nearing the end of breakfast, as Draco was delicately placing a piece of pancake in his mouth; Dumbledore stood and waved his arms once over the gathered breakfast eaters. Malfoy noted from the corner of his eye that Potter was in the room, chatting amicably with his little friends; he bit viciously into an olive. "Ladies and Gentlemen, boys and girls." Draco rolled his eyes, he had always known that this place was a three ring circus, all that was missing were the elephants, oh, no, Professor Sprout was just taking her seat at the head table. "I apologize for interrupting your meals, but I have an announcement to make."

The whole Hall waited with baited breath, typical. "I am aware that it is late notice as Quidditch season begins today," Dumbledore was interrupted by cheering but calmly stood with his hands folded until it abated. "However, I regret to inform the student body that due to recent circumstances I can not allow any outdoor sporting event to begin this year. I fear we are in for a nasty term, and it is in the best interest of the students to avoid the pitch all together. To that extent, all Hogsmeade visits will also be canceled. Unless specified by a teacher and under severe guard I would like the students to all remain within the building, and certainly on the grounds. Thank you, and enjoy the rest of your day."

There was a mass bellow of outrage, but none was so ardent as that of Harry Potter. Again, it was typical, cancel Quidditch, Potter was yelling, Draco could have laughed if he had his jaw in working order. Cancel Quidditch?

"PROFESSOR!" He roared, "You can't do this to us!" Potter was on his feet, but then so was Draco, adding his voice to the indignant cacophony. "Professor Dumbledore, if we cancel Quidditch, we'll be advertising the threat of Voldemort, aren't you the one that's always saying fear of a thing increases its danger?" Draco was close to laughing – Potter was right of course, but throwing the words of a venerable man back in his face generally got you no further than a hex. "You can't do this to us; it will suck all the joy out of everything."

Dumbledore sighed and Harry dropped back to his bench with a plop, he'd said his piece and it was up to Dumbledore to react. "I'm sorry Harry," he said wearily, "but it is my first and last duty to protect my students."

"What's the point of being a student, or really anything else, if there's going to be no joy in it." Harry mumbled petulantly, but the whole school heard him, and he'd won.

The rules just didn't apply to invincible Harry Potter, he was never chastised for speaking out of place, but applauded for his courage – if Quidditch weren't at stake Draco would have spat. Harry, despite his efforts to the contrary had an expansive flare for the dramatic, and it was impossible to argue a case against something that: Harry was essentially delivering an ultimatum, a dangerous one. Remove the joy, kill the cause. Draco may have been raised by an over bearing father and a mother that wrapped him in a silk cocoon of over-protection, but he knew people and their politics.

Granger sent Potter a look that was both exasperated fondness and stunned mortification _'Harry!' _she was saying,_ 'what the hell do you think you're doing?'_: Draco decided that he'd been spending far too much of his time watching the golden trio if he could break down their facial expressions from 30 meters away. "All right," Dumbledore ceded, "team captains, when you've finished your breakfast join me in my office to discuss this."

Snape looked livid, his face was paler than ordinary, his nostrils were somehow sucking in and out without moving at all, and his eyes were glittering furiously under pronounced brows. Draco wasn't sure if he should be nervous or highly amused by his head of house's behavior, the man was rarely so expressive and Draco Malfoy feared for Gryffindor's house points; or rather, rejoiced at what would surely be their sudden and dramatic disappearance.

The assembled captain's marveled at Harry Potter as he listed his extensive knowledge of both Muggle and Wizarding candy, they didn't realize why he was doing this. Even the new Ravenclaw Captain Ethan Lawrence had begun to wonder if Harry was insane when finally on the sighed announcement of "Guacamole Jelly Beans?" Frank the gargoyle slid out of the way with a wet grind and the spiral staircase to Dumbledore's office emerged.

Draco Malfoy brushed past the other three captains and took what he thought was his rightful place at the head of the group, regally marching up the stairs to join the Headmasters, both past and present. There was a pregnant pause as Malfoy stopped at the top of the stairs, unsure of whether to knock or just stride in like he owned the building. In any other situation he naturally would've chosen the latter, however this _was _the headmaster's office, the one person in the universe that Malfoys were intimidated by.

"Stop poncing and get on with it!" Harry growled and shoved Malfoy through the door, permanently ending his internal argument as he stumbled ungracefully through the portcullis.

"Ah boys." The headmaster greeted, habitually and violently rubbing at his tired, fresh eyes.

Yes all of the captains were male this year, it hadn't occurred to Harry that in Cho's absence her second would take her place. Now it hit him rather violently. Every time he was in this office it somehow related, albeit obscurely, to Quidditch, or maybe it related directly to Cho Chang. He took a seat in a chintz armchair and ignored the tea placed in front of him. Harry didn't miss Cho, he hadn't given it much thought at all really, which was far more disturbing than the news of her death; but he thought about her now with Quidditch so close to being gone from his life.

Cho had been an amazing flyer, like she'd been born on a broom and hadn't left it since, developing a style that managed to both define and magnify her personality. She managed to mock the other players, smiling and teasing them as she lovingly beat the snot out of them at Quidditch until it was impossible not to adore her. She was charismatic and lively, and though it might've been difficult to see out of the air; when she was flying everyone knew it. It was risky, it was open, brash, sharp and cutting, and utterly amazing. Harry did miss watching her fly, even if she was spoiled and mercurial on the ground, he missed watching her fly.

Cedric had managed the same feat of person and personality. He was steadfast, he always watched what he was doing, where he was; Harry was willing to bet that if asked Cedric could have relayed the exact positions of the players on the field in any given moment. He didn't feint to the left like Cho did, or to the right like Harry, he didn't dive when it wasn't necessary, he didn't expend energy on deceiving others, he was who he was, straightforward. He wasn't full of self importance or grandeur, he was just good, honest Cedric; it wouldn't have been impossible to deduce everything about the boy simply by watching him fly.

These were such sunny memories and they brought an absent smile to his face. Rain or shine, come hell or high water the Quidditch captains could be seen grinning broadly, no matter how many streaks of mud were on their faces. Harry supposed the same could be said of any Quidditch lover. Sometimes he wondered what he looked like when he flew, but his own style wasn't something he dwelled on or would probably recognize on anyone else; he had more important things to think about. "Harry… what are your thoughts?"

Harry jerked and sloshed his cold tea all over his lap, "What? Which thoughts?" Someone snorted and Harry's face burned.

"Mister Malfoy's compromise, Mister Potter? Are you in agreement?"

Harry's confusion must have shown on his face because Malfoy rolled his eyes and said, "Just say yes Potter, I'm sure someone will fill you in on the details later." Harry glared flatly at him.

"Mister Malfoy had brought up a very interesting point. Quidditch matches, as it stands, are not mandatory in attendance. The students, if they are uncomfortable with attending the games, they are not required to do so. The players are also welcome to… um, not attend."

"Oh," said Harry. If the fans were afraid of attacks on the pitch, they could avoid it altogether; however, with Dumbledore's support behind the sport things would stay exactly the same, or at least he hoped so for the sake of the school, Quidditch was, after all, the staple of the entertainment outside of pranking and sleeping around. Harry felt rather like a specimen under a microscope, people were staring at him awaiting his approval but he couldn't for the life of him figure out why, what was he supposed to say to a thing like that anyway? "Sure I guess." Because it really was the most obvious thing in the world.

"Wonderful." Dumbledore rubbed his hands together, looking less like someone plotting the resurgence of a sport than a fly, doing so because he didn't know what else to do with them. "Now boys, it's your responsibility to inform your teams of the potential danger involved in Quidditch so they can make an informed decision of whether or not they're going to stay on…"

Surely he was going to say more, because the rare moments that Professor Albus Dumbledore was brief were usually cause for deep investigation, concern, or excessive eating, but Draco Malfoy cleared his throat. "Why don't you make the announcement to the whole school professor?" He asked in the over polite, condescending voice of someone with absolutely no respect nor patience for the person in front of him. "The students are far more likely to take your word for it."

Harry hated to admit it, but he agreed with Dumbledore when he said "Quite right Mister Malfoy." Dumbledore was a respected, First-Class-Merlin-Awarded wizard, if there were anyone the students trusted to keep them safe it would be Dumbledore. Naturally, Harry suspected Malfoy of appealing to his own, selfish nature; Malfoy was a show off, whether deliberate or subconscious he would want to draw a crowd. He and Malfoy were rarely cooperative, they rarely desired or fought for the same thing, and Harry was interested to note that they made a decent team. Harry got his foot in the door, and Malfoy battered it open, a behemoth in the world of logic. That line of thought made Harry rather ill, the thought of permanently working with Malfoy, _any_ Malfoy could only appeal to a masochist. "Very well boys, tryouts for your respective teams will commence at your discretion – I would appreciate it if you allowed Madam Hooch to sit in on your team practices. You are dismissed."

As he left the Headmaster's office, Ethan and the Hufflepuff captain Zacharias Smith (both of whom were replacement captains for people that Harry essentially killed), were chatting animatedly about the upcoming season. Ethan's advancement had been somewhat bittersweet, and until this moment, when he'd almost lost it, he was tentative about enjoying the sport: apparently he had overcome his apprehension.

"I hate you." Malfoy said when Ethan and Zach were out of earshot, not that the news was uncommon, but if they were going to fight, they may as well do so in the privacy of their own corridor.

"I'm delighted you cleared that up," said Harry, "because your behavior these past five years hasn't given me a clue."

Malfoy longed to smack the smug smirk off Harry's face, but he was also bursting to laugh aloud. The blatant mockery was so uncharacteristic that he found himself enjoying the near-friendly combat, which of course made him want to scream obscenities and mortally wound his juvenile nemesis. However, he did none of these things; instead he raised a delicate eyebrow and schooled his features into a generous non-smile. "How surprising!" He said airily, "Given your immense capacity for drooling idiocy, I thought it best to inform you lest you were oblivious."

Harry snorted, Malfoy just couldn't be avoided. Had he opened the conversation with a typically petulant 'Leave me alone, Malfoy,' Malfoy would have eaten him alive, but it was strange to find himself enjoying the open animosity. The thoughts that occurred to him were bizarre, strangely normal, and perhaps overly tactical, but very strangely normal. "Says the man who counts among his friends the infamously thick, in more ways than one now that I think on it, Crabbe and Goyle"

Malfoy sniffed and held his autocratic nose in the air, his father once told him that royalty did this so as not to smell the huddled masses. Personally he thought the gesture sufficed to say they were not subject to the stench of their own bullshit, but he'd never expressed this thought, and certainly wouldn't today. "Stupid they may be." He said solemnly, "But Vincent and Gregory are loyal. And if loyalty is begot by stupidity, then let the world be stupid to the few and varied intelligent."

Harry's smirk broadened but turned a bit hard; that was an unfortunately sad truth really, and Harry had never been so disgusted with the world. He relinquished a point to Malfoy in his head and carried the thread, "True enough that humanity lives by a societal dictatorship, and by its very nature is designed for a dictatorship in government, but humanity is also, unsurprisingly, opposed to tyranny."

"That's a paradox!" Malfoy burst out, startling a portrait into glaring at them as they walked to potions. This was quite possibly the most bizarre conversation he'd ever had, Potter on the subject of tyrannical method. "If the nature of humanity is to be dominated by a singular dictator, it is also the nature of the intelligent individual to therefore be a tyrant. If knowledge begets power, and power begets evil, it's only logical that humanity be dominated by the most evil!"

Harry blinked, then laughed. This was perturbing to a degree he wasn't willing to fathom, simply because it made sense. He caught Malfoy's meaning, understood it even, and while it wasn't a doctrine he necessarily subscribed to, he could see where the logic worked. Not that he particularly wanted to discuss Voldemort now, or ever, or with Malfoy. In fact, he was quite adamantly against the idea, given his current disgust with the species and his lack of resistance to Malfoy's logic, it would probably be an awful idea anyway; so he narrowed in on what any teenaged-boy would catch. "Oooh kinky."

Malfoy gaped like a landed fish when he realized what he'd actually said, stupid, horrendous semantics. The fighting spark that had been reluctantly diminished since the beginning of this conversation abruptly flared back to life, "That is not what I meant!" Malfoy scowled darkly and threw his hands into the air to emphasize his point, but Harry just laughed in his face. "Oh I hate you!"

Harry rolled his eyes, Malfoy's knack for stating the obvious never ceased to astound him: Why yes Malfoy, there is a scar on my head, there's one on my knee too, you don't seem to be raving about that. Why yes Malfoy, I did catch the snitch in my mouth, and yes, it was possibly one of the most ridiculous catches in the history of Quidditch. Why yes Malfoy, I do wear glasses, so kind of you to notice, perhaps you'd like to buy me contacts with the money you flaunt around. Yes Malfoy, I know you're rich. "That being evident," Harry said in his best imitation of Oprah, though Malfoy would neither catch nor appreciate the reference, "Let's move on: why is it that you hate me so much?"

Draco was silent, so Harry persisted, he was unconcerned about Malfoy asking the same in response, he had never doubted for a moment that Malfoy cared about why people hated him, or that they did at all. It made goading him remarkably easy, "Saving a decent tragedy you could use to wean sympathy from Parkinson, there is absolutely no reason for your behavior."

"I don't need a sob story for Parkinson's affections." Malfoy hissed irritably, why was it such a goddamned long walk from Dumbledore's office to Potions B?

"No, I don't imagine you do." Harry didn't mean it as a compliment.

Malfoy suppressed the urge to say 'I hate you' again because Potter was obviously still looking for a response, and that would only fuel the necessity of his question. "Because you always have to win!" He snapped finally, "You have everything, you always have to win, and you don't even appreciate it!" Stupid Potter had even taken that from him, Harry was the only person that could set him so off balance, had anyone else asked the same question he could've handed them a thousand and one inane answers that were truthful, but not anything nearing the truth. Stupid stupid Potter.

Harry's incredulous laugh escaped him in a gust of air, like a piston jettisoning off steam, or like a punch in the gut. He thought of Cho, he thought of Cedric, he thought of his parents, he thought of Sirius, and he thought of the Dursleys. If this was winning, he thought, losing sounded divine. But he didn't say anything, because they were standing at the back of the potions class room with argument-flushed faces, and Snape was glaring.

* * *

Draco Malfoy dreamt that he was strapped down to a white table, in a white room, surrounded by white Muggles with white jackets, and he'd been stripped of his wand. "Doctor," Said one of the all-white people, "we believe we've learned all we can from the specimen's living environment and interaction with its fellow species. It is time for an in-depth investigation of its biological functions."

"I agree nurse, please assist me with my gloves." It suddenly occurred to Draco that he was naked, and cold, and frightened, and hovering over him was a faceless man with a gleaming scalpel. The man nodded down at him unsympathetically, "Because your species proved difficult in revealing your secrets to us, and because we so desire to emulate your remarkable abilities, I fear it is your responsibility, and your duty to the human race to die for us." The speech sounded long practiced, Draco might have said the same to a toad before dissecting it. And that was precisely what the Muggle doctor intended, Draco became swiftly ill.

"I'm human!" He screamed, "I'm human I'm human I'm human!" But the doctor couldn't hear him, or wasn't listening, or just didn't give a damn either way, so great was his desire for Draco's magic. "I'm human, I have a soul, please don't do this I'm HUMAN!"

* * *

Hermione woke at precisely 5:30am and rolled out of bed, knowing all too well that she wouldn't be able to sleep again until night. She slid into the girl's bathroom, brushed her teeth, did her business, and headed down to the kitchen for the early pot the house elves always put on. No one really knew it, but she was a monster without her morning coffee. The sun still hadn't reached the horizon and wouldn't be up for at least another hour, but that just made the morning easier to accept, there was something easier about waking up in the dark. Not that she could sleep anyway.

Her dreams had been short and fragmented. Hermione knew that sleeping pills interrupted the R.E.M cycle and that R.E.M was an act of processing neural impulses and mental discharge, but she was dependent on the pills now and that's just the way it would have to be. Her brain would have to find some other avenue to recharge itself.

The soles of Hermione's slippers were making a slick sort of whine against the stone as she shuffled towards the kitchen, she almost didn't hear the soft choked sounds coming from one of the alcoves on her left. The desperate struggle between curiosity and coffee in her hand was sad, but finally curiosity won out on the grounds that the source of that curiosity was tenuous at best, her coffee would be waiting for her if she finally made it to the kitchen.

On the floor, with her face in her hands and her hair in disarray, like it had been run through again and again with violent fingers, was Marjorie Durham. Hermione had been keeping a wary eye on her for the past few weeks, her face was always pale, she often missed breakfast, and she was wearing looser clothes all the time, but nothing seemed horribly out of place. Marjorie was always quiet and reserved, but now she seemed more distant. Seeing her like this, and the break down in the bathroom had Hermione convinced that something was seriously wrong, and she intended to find out what it was. "Marjorie?"

"Oh no…" Marjorie groaned and dug her nails into her scalp, sobbing. "No no not you."

Hermione prepared for the long haul, she'd seen that look on a lot of faces, and that slope in a lot of shoulders. Marjorie looked like someone that was between wailing and curling up in a ball to die like a roach. It was the roach motel this school, none of the dead wanted to bother the living, so they canned it up and crawled into corners to slowly decay. And the living… went scurrying around in peoples refrigerators because they just couldn't see the bodies crumbling around them – that was fine, Marjorie was just beginning to die, she'd stop having these breakdowns soon, she'd stop crying soon enough. She'd stop making any noise at all. Not that Hermione wanted to watch that happen to anyone else, God she needed coffee. "Marjorie, will you please tell me what's wrong?"

Marjorie glared at her, her eyes were read and puffy, and her lips were blue. "Why?" She asked acerbically, "So you can 'help' me? You can't save everyone Granger."

Hermione knew this thank-you-very-much, just like she knew a lot of other things she couldn't prevent, but she also couldn't stop herself from trying. It was far too early in the morning to be having a conversation like this, especially with herself, so she gave into her maternal instincts and kneeled down next to Marjorie, despite the other girl's wishes. Hermione also chose to ignore Marjorie's distain, she ignored a lot of things, and sometimes it was the only way she got by. Here was to praying teenaged mood-swings weren't just a rumor. "Margie, I'm your friend, please… tell me what's wrong."

Apparently Hermione's sincere tone did the trick because they hadn't spoken three words to each other in five years until now, or maybe it was the hand on her shoulder, or the fact that Marjorie had been struggling with her own mind for the last month, but she launched herself at Hermione and buried her face in the other girl's shoulder. "Oh Hermione, it's awful! I don't know what to do!" After a few hiccupping sobs that thoroughly soaked the shoulder of Hermione's robe, she finally looked up, "I'm pregnant."

Oh yes, it was _far _too early to be dealing with this.

* * *

**Post Notes: **spits god I hate this chapter, Quidditch as an excuse for a conversation. Well, I more hate the Quidditch bit than the conversation bit but shrugs you get the idea… gick. Oh yes, Marjorie – pregnant girl, original character (I hope) not at all a Mary Sue, frankly, she's just there to…. grins I'm not spoiling it. 


	5. Tradition

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended. – no suey the poor student.

**Notes: **You know – these earlier chapters, I can't really say that I'm a fan, but that's okay. There's Quidditch, there's teasing Ron, there's Draco Malfoy, there's a reference to bull gorillas, life is good. I would thank people for their wonderful reviews, but there are none. …ordinarily I would be sad about this but I think I've given up on general principle.

Warnings include excessive dissertation on nothing at all.

* * *

**Chapter 5: Tradition**

"Oh leave off Malfoy!" This again. This was four years of Quidditch ritual coming back to smack him upside the head when he least needed it, this was five years of enmity, fighting, trying to best each other and never quite succeeding, this was a life time of arguably the most ardent rivalry in history. This was a pain in the ass.

Harry had been studying like mad, Hermione was a slave driver just before mid-terms, and his head wouldn't stop spinning with algorithms. Who knew beginning Arithmancy was such a horrible subject, why had he decided to take an extra course? What on earth possessed him to think he would be bored this year? He was team captain, responsible for working his own team to death and having a fraction of Wood's energy, Hermione was frantic about NEWTs which were still a year away, and there was still the business of saving the world to contend with. Harry was bone weary. And then came Malfoy.

"Slytherin will wipe the floor with you!" He hissed, one of his pointed fingers in Harry's chest. Somewhere in Harry's mind it registered that having a finger in ones pectoral muscle was extremely painful.

"Give it up Malfoy. Forfeit already, you'll never get to the snitch before me and you know it." He had admitted as much at the beginning of the season hadn't he? Malfoy hissed.

"On or off the field, Potter," He spat at last, glaring daggers, "a half-blood Muggle lover will never be good enough to beat me."

"The evidence speaks otherwise."

Just as both boys were curling their hands into fists, ready to let fly like a couple of bull-gorillas fighting for territory they were interrupted by Madam Hooch. "Save it for the match!" she shouted at them, and that was that. In the next moment Harry was on the field, trying to crush Malfoy's hand with his own, whistle blown, in the air, Seamus Finnegan shouting furiously into the microphone, and the world narrowed down to a single point. Harry watched for the snitch, and Malfoy watched Harry. That's the way it always went, Malfoy always tried to out-pace him, which was a ridiculous plan of attack because Harry was on a faster broom. Malfoy's game was good when he was being subtle, but he'd never go pro if he wasn't willing to look for the snitch on his own, it was too easy to dupe him.

Points were scored, Slytherin was up by 20, but Harry wasn't really paying attention. He was scanning the sky methodically, perpetually turning in the air. It was sunny, bright and cloudless, which made the game wonderful for every player but him. He wasn't suffering from glare, but when it was overcast, or even raining, the snitch had a sort of glow about it. It was subtle, easy to miss, but it stood out like a lighthouse if you knew what to look for, and that was Harry's gift, he knew what to look for.

Four hours into the game and the sky was bruise-purple, liberally spattered with red clouds. The points were hiked into the 300s, and the crowd had bellowed happily every time someone scored, but even it had lost some of its enthusiasm. The sun was setting, and everyone knew that Death Eaters attacked at night.

Of course, anyone that took the time to think it through would realize that a Death Eater would never attack on the Hogwarts Quidditch pitch, it was too open, there were too many excellent witches and wizards just sitting around, and in the milling chaos of the students, no death eater could hit their mark. Not even Voldemort himself. It was, however, beyond the mob mentality to consider those possibilities, and it was in the nature of crowds to think the worst of any situation. Harry was somewhat disgusted by it, but then, he was all alone on the field.

Harry's eyes were starting to ache from staring at nothing for so long. His neck hurt, and his ears would surely start bleeding any minute, because hovering next to him was Malfoy, insulting and abrasive as always. Three words from his mouth and Harry was ready to clean his clock; perhaps the sleep deprivation was making him crankier than he thought. It was fortunate that he chose to rub the back of his neck at that moment because one hundred feet below him Harry caught the faint magical glimmer of enchanted wings, and dove.

Malfoy followed him down, so Harry let himself free fall, stream-lining himself to cut down on wind resistance. The snitch was nearly touching the ground and he was right on top of it. His broom spun out from under him and Harry was forced to roll several times before righting himself, a dive like that could've killed him, but worse, Malfoy was ahead by half. It was obvious what had happened, the crowd was booing, the blonde was somehow gaining on the snitch, and he had just been knocked tail over tip; clearly, Malfoy had snagged the end of his broom.

The snitch dodged left, so did Harry and Malfoy, they were neck and neck now, taking swipes at each other whenever they thought they could risk it. Malfoy got a good punch in on Harry's face, so Harry kicked him in the abdomen, forcing him to barrel roll or crash. It gave him the perfect opportunity to close his fist around the snitch. He pulled his broom up to slow it down but forgot that Malfoy was behind him.

"OOMPH!" They both said it as they both hit the ground at the same angle and rolled violently on the hard-packed earth, still fighting, though Harry didn't know for what.

* * *

Sibyll Trelawney bit down on her lip contemplatively and buried her face in her hands. She could feel it, there was a ghostly cool liquid trickling down her spine, and an oppressive weight on her shoulders that no one else could see or feel. Her office was dark and gloomy, still carrying the heavy scent of sandalwood incense, but none were lit. She wouldn't be able to stay much longer, she was being called back, and it wasn't much of a surprise to her; these were dangerous times. Her students would find her overly dramatic, but they could not see what was to pass, none of them could.

Oh yes, she knew those who tried from those who didn't. It wasn't difficult to see the difference in neither quality nor accuracy; though divination was a tremulous art at best it was essentially comparing a firebug lantern to a flashlight. Of the few that made the attempt, none were particularly talented and it saddened her to a degree, because among the skeptics there were some with immense capability but no faith.

Sibyll was not disappointed in those who did not try. She didn't care one way or another, she passed her students, she got her wages, she ate her food: none of it was important. She had suffered this same nervous, nauseated weight in the days before her interview with Professor Dumbledore sixteen years ago. It was the only reason she'd gone, and the only reason she'd stayed; fate put her there, away from the strife of her earlier life, and fate would keep her there until her death. But she didn't have time to think about it, because she could feel something coming.

There was a full glass of brandy, a bottle of black ink next to her, and a blank sheet of paper in front of her. There was something horribly familiar about this scenario, her father used to sit in his study and sip at a tumbler of single-malt scotch, kneading his temples with his knuckles and staring blankly at his desk. She never understood why he did so, or at least she hadn't until after he died. Though Cassandra was her great-great-great grandmother on her mother's side, her father had the true gift – an empathy with the spirit world that few could hope to match. She was seven when it happened, his final prophecy, and she didn't realize what had transpired until she reached puberty; that great and terrible blossoming of body and soul.

Those first years were terrible for her; everything she touched was an image, a memory, a flash of someone else's life burning behind her own eyes. Some were wonderful and happy, so bright and full of joy they brought tears to her eyes, others were just the opposite. With every object she so much as brushed against, another emotion flooded her, leaving her weak, helpless, awash in foreign feelings and utterly helpless. She started wearing gloves, wrapping herself in layers to prevent even the mildest contact until she could control it, see what she needed to see and nothing else.

Sibyll had worked so hard to overcome that, she'd meditated and performed focusing mental exercises for years, living in a white room with white carpet because the sensory memory of colors was too much. Her mother, who had never been afflicted with this curse, supported her wholly by wearing white and bringing her food three times a day. It was hard, so hard that she nearly went mad, and by the time she'd over come it, it was nearly too late. Sibyll was by no means a powerful diviner, if she were, her powers would have manifested themselves at her birth or before, and she would have the innate ability to live with them. Instead, they'd manifested at age thirteen and she had to learn to live with them: the number thirteen had always carried personal negative connotations for her. Many witches and wizards with the gift went mad with the inability to adapt.

Fortunately for her, adaptation was a skill that Sibyll had in spades. When she was young, her family moved from home to home and she was always forced to make new friends; at the time she didn't understand why, but her mother later explained to her that her father saw disastrous fates for the houses they were in, though he never knew if the seeing was from the future or the past. When she was a teen she was afflicted with a gift of her own, and instead of being destroyed by it she made it her own and suppressed it to a depth that it rarely manifested itself in the form of a prophecy. At age nineteen she'd finally overcome the plague of the sight and was able to make it on her own. She had terrible episodes that she eventually overcame with the liberal use of marijuana and alcohol that eventually led to a heroin addiction.

It was a part of the times and the culture, she blended in, used to escape her cursed biological form, and was eventually forced to overcome that too. She was dying in those days, and she felt it. Her life was slowly ebbing away with every injection, her body slowly decaying because she never fed it, never bathed it, hardly even moved it except to crawl from one slum to another. She'd become careless, very very careless with her magic and with her visions, one afternoon, she was reaching for a belt to tie herself off and was assaulted by the sight of her own corpse, desiccated in a corner, rotting because none of her friends had found her yet.

Sibyll gave it up after that, by the time she was 27 she had completely kicked the habit, and she never considered going back. With nowhere to turn and no experience at any sort of a job she took up life as a palm reader at a Muggle mall, reading the futures of ignorant teenagers that wouldn't stop giggling, and telling them what they wanted to know. When she was 34, she found her stomach seething, and a constant flush on her cheeks despite her chronic freezing. At first she thought it was a sign of early menopause until she had her period. Then one morning while reading through her copy of the Daily Prophet she spotted Professor Dumbledore's advertisement and had a prophecy right there in the Hog's Head Inn.

She'd changed again, into the doddering old woman that she was today, wincing every time her students snickered at her in a corridor. It pained her now, when she saw the students with the gift, those that never winced when things exploded, those that never tried anything new. They would come into their own, just as she had, even if the whole world saw them as mad for a bit. The feeling was back, painful and seething just below her stomach, her face was hot, fevered even, but she was chilled to the bone. She would probably be lost in the mists for days after, it always happened to her because she suppressed her gift.

But there was no time to think of any of it. The ritual for the Prophecy charm was nothing so melodramatic as standing in a pentagram of white chalk and dousing herself in chicken's blood as so many ridiculous Muggles would have it, but there was preparation involved. Sibyll reached for an empty glass and her letter opener with a sigh, this was where Muggles got their pathetic ideas about magic. She wouldn't deny it, there were some spells that benefited from the use of human blood, but Sibyll had never found a spell or potion where human blood was absolutely necessary to the desired effect. That wasn't to say her magical education had been all-inclusive, but nothing she dealt in _required_ human blood. Instead, blood added the effect of stability to most spells and potions, it made targets clearer, and better defined incantations. The substance itself was in no way magical, but because of the importance people placed on it, it could be used as a conduit for magic. It was a matter of faith and symbolism more than actual magic, even Muggles recognized blood as a powerful substance; the sight and use of blood in both cinema and life was of significant consequence.

The same could be said of magical wands. The core of a wand was not necessary to perform magic. Bicorn tail, Unicorn hair, Dragon's Heartstring, and Phoenix feathers were all powerful substances in spells and potions, that couldn't be disputed, especially as many were crucial to said spells. However, in wands they merely acted as a placebo, representative of something within the wizard that enabled them to focus their magic; unicorns were pure, dragons were strong and brave, the phoenix represented vision and rebirth. Despite the fact that children could use magic before given proper wands at age 11, most witches and wizards believed that the body part of an inherently magical being was crucial to the existence of their magic until a study was done in 1,853 by the Administration of Wandless Magic. The study showed that the animal parts did not in fact enhance the effects of the magic, that it was instead the belief that a magical creature's contribution to a wand made the magic more powerful. All the same, the tradition of using wand cores continued.

Sibyll was constantly frustrated by the school's unwillingness to teach 'wandless' magic. Wizards had become reliant on their wands to perform the simplest of spells, and very few of the students realized that anything from a pencil to a wicker basket could be used to cast focused magic. But that timeless argument was neither here nor there, because she simply did not have the time to think on it.

With a violent jab, Sibyll Trelawney stabbed her palm with the letter opener and watched as dark red blood welled in her hand then dripped on the parchment. It was frustrating this business, getting side tracked by life as she was trying to prepare for her own death.

* * *

Draco's eyes snapped open and he immediately sat up and took stock of his surroundings. Where was he, how did he get here? It took a heart beat for it all to come flooding back to him, he'd lost another game, was inevitably in the infirmary. Moonlight faintly cut through the darkness in the room, highlighting the gleaming floor; Draco hated hospitals. His father would be so disappointed over his defeat, he would undoubtedly suffer several of the 'oh Draco' sighs and the 'You are a Malfoy, you should perform to the best of your ability' lecture. Already he could hear the letter in his head, "Draco, I need you to understand, we have a reputation to uphold…." Draco could repeat it by rote now, and it only succeeded in making him more irritable every time he heard it. Of course he was a Malfoy, of course he 'performed to the best of his ability' of course he gave everything his all, but all he had just wasn't enough.

Nothing was ever enough for his father, it was immensely frustrating for a young man who strove to be excellent at everything he did. His academic performance was astounding, but he could never top the Mudblood, he flew like a hawk, but never beat Potter to the snitch, he succeeded at everything he tried, but was always overshadowed by someone else, someone better, someone more worthy. There was something missing, an intrinsic part of him that prevented him from ever being the best at anything.

When Draco had been very young, before he started keeping himself locked in the library, he was playing a game of ground Quidditch, enthusiastically kicking after the quaffle as a chaser. At dinner that evening, still basking in the warm afternoon glow of ground Quidditch and lemonade he happily related to his father that he had scored 12 goals, and that Crabbe only had 4. His father asked him why he hadn't scored 13, and Draco never told him about another game.

Since that moment, he could distinctly recall feeling less than a Malfoy, at family occasions he was clearly the brightest mind, the most dominant force in his generation, the cleverest person anyone had ever seen. But it was all for naught as no one he cared about recognized his efforts until the only thing he had to work for was his ego, which was growing both larger and smaller by proxy. Sitting here in the Hospital Wing with nothing but his head for company he felt an intense ache that had nothing to do with his broken collar bone or very bruised posterior.

Gingerly sitting up, Draco scratched at his nose, realizing for the first time that one of his fingers was purple and in a splint. "Brilliant." He said stiffly, running a hand through his hair, it was a mess, and he pulled out a tiny dead twig. This was all Potter's fault, and a hot wave of loathing washed through him. This was yet another victory he hadn't achieved. If his father cared about trivial things like Quidditch, he would be having an apoplexy. Instead, Draco expected to receive a well drafted, extensive letter from Azkaban on how these little disappointments in childhood would make him less worthy of being an esteemed Death Eater. Like battery acid in his blood that infected his heart and rotted in his stomach until he found himself vomiting in the hall toilet. "This is all your fault Potter."

"I know." Said Harry from the next bed, his voice low and groggy.

Draco's head whipped around, pulling at his shoulder, for one terrifying moment he felt as if he was in a Muggle horror cinema, trapped in the closet with the killer standing before him. It was an irrational impulse that passed quickly, but his heart pounded as he quietly said, "How long have you been awake?"

Harry carefully considered the question, how long had he been awake, how long had he been asleep, how long had he been alive? He couldn't confidently answer any of those questions, especially as Madam Pomfrey had taken off his watch to splint his wrist. Time moved in strange ways for him, too fast, too slow, but never the way it ran for everyone else, hours at a time quite often went by without his notice—Hermione was getting worried, but that was no surprise. "A few hours." He said, assuming it was correct, it wasn't as though he knew.

"I hate you Potter."

"I'm sorry."

Draco couldn't tell which was more terrifying, the fact that he said it, or that it sounded sincere. "GO BACK TO SLEEP!" Bellowed Madam Pomfrey's voice from her adjoining bedroom.

* * *

"Hey 'Mione, when's your birthday?" asked Marjorie from across the table, leaning over conspiratorially while managing to keep her nose in a book.

Hermione smiled at her, Marjorie was so much happier than she had been at the start of term, and even into October. She was gratified to know that the dramatic change had been, in part, her influence, ever since Marjorie's shocking confession in the hallway that blustery October morning Hermione had kept herself close at hand, always a shoulder to cry on and always an accepting friend. Given her pureblood status and aristocratic bloodline, Marjorie knew her father would be furious with her to the point of disownment, and she had said as much to Hermione in the weeks since. However, combined with her stunning research skills and overwhelming passion for sticking her nose into other people's business, Hermione had gained Marjorie's friendship and the title of unconditional best friend. When she saw that Marjorie was staring at her expectantly Hermione realized she had asked a question and promptly wiped the dreamy half-smile off of her face. "It's January 23rd, why do you ask?"

"Ah!" Marjorie said triumphantly, "I thought so! You act just like an Aquarius. Intelligent, dreamy, and absolutely rooted to logic."

Ron snorted around his bangers and mash. He had very mixed feelings about Marjorie, she was a nice girl and had a lovely smattering of freckles on her nose, but she had managed to steal his best friend. Not Harry of course, Harry was disappearing for various reasons; he was extremely confused by the whole thing because though Harry was there, he wasn't. Hermione on the other hand was there all the time, talking and laughing with all of her friends from various houses, Luna, Marjorie, and even the Patil girls. She was there, but she wasn't with him. It was unusual and disparaging for Ron, he was very lonely, more so than he had been last year. At least when they were fighting they were paying attention to each other. These days, Ron felt like a fifth wheel, but he couldn't discuss any of this with Hermione because she looked so happy he couldn't force himself to ruin it.

He knew all about Marjorie's situation and was sympathetic, but abstractly furious with her by being so damned needy. He was no less needy of course, and no less furious with himself. "Oh you know I don't hold any stock in that stuff!" Hermione was saying through gales of laughter as Marjorie read off all of her negative qualities from an astrology book.

"Case in point." Ron chimed in, grinning at them both. "Did you see the look on Trelawney's face when she walked out? I swear the old bat looked like a squished fly with her mouth wide open and her eyes popping out!" Everyone laughed at the memory, saving Hermione who had missed the expression on the divination teacher's face.

"What are you doing taking divination anyway?" Hermione finally asked, more serious now that academia was involved. "I thought you were taking Arithmancy again this year."

"Oh I am. But since the DADA teacher this year is a buffoon," this was true, for instead of bringing back the one competent defense against the dark arts teacher they'd ever had, Dumbledore had hired a squeaky little wizard that twitched every time someone mentioned unicorns. After every class, one student could always be heard swearing that Professor Blirghty _had _to be a close cousin of Flitwick. "I'm taking divination instead. It's really quite interesting in a bizarre sort of way."

"Pah." Said Hermione, rolling her eyes affectionately.

"Oh Hermione," Marjorie took a bite of potatoes and turned the page of her book, "loosen up. Who's next?"

"I'm a Taurus! May 7th." 1

"Oh Ron, that was obvious. Stubborn, awkward, shy, a bit boring… by the way, are you ever going to ask that Slytherin girl out?"

"Gee… thanks Marge." Ron deadpanned, abstaining from comment on his distant crush.

"Oh! Let's not forget a bull in a china cabinet!" Hermione quipped, elbowing him in the side and grinning in the face of his blush. Was it his fault he'd accidentally knocked that row of plates over last week? Why no it wasn't as he had clearly tripped… on his shoelace. Then again, maybe she had a point.

Ron stared at them both blankly as they poked fun at his astrological sign, that was the last time he'd mention anything like his star sign to a girl. "Okay, changing the subject! Harry, we're going to Zonko's this weekend aren't we? It's Halloween and all."

Harry turned towards him, a blank look in his eyes for a moment and a bit of liverwurst on his lip, "Of course." He said finally, shaking his head to clear it of cobwebs, "Figured I'd go as a spider this year."

"Ha ha," Said Ron.

* * *

**Post Notes:** Okay, excusing my shit pun (and it was REALLY bad), I have in fact read the 6th book, I know Ron's birthday is stated as March First, but can you HONESTLY see Ron as a Pisces? Wishy-washy, clingy, emotional… oh wait, sorry, just describing the Pisces I happen to know. The boy practically SCREAMS Taurus at me. And yes – I know, I'm being mean to Ron, really, I'd tell you why but that would ruin it, I guess I'm just trying to give Hermione a new friend (away from Ron and Harry). 


	6. Thank you for Nothing

**Disclaimer: **This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

**Notes: **God I'm really starting to hate this story – usually there's a grace period between 'writing it' and 'hating it', but… maybe just because it's so long my grace period was eaten up – ah well, it is what it is. Thanks everyone who's read thus far, and don't forget to leave a review!

**Warnings:** Character Death. Relax, it's far from gorey, the original version was MUCH ickier, but… yes someone dies, and ... I kinda liked how it happened.

* * *

**Chapter 6 **Thank You for Nothing

Roger Davies lay on his bed staring at his blue bed hangings. His spiraling depression was ridiculous, something borne of excessive sympathy from his school mates and family. He recognized it. Saw that yes, he had deeply cared for Cho, if only for a few weeks, loved her even, and it was because of that that he found himself acting like a teenaged girl. Melodramatic and angst ridden, whenever he thought about it, he wanted to gag up breakfast; wouldn't that be something? Sitting in the middle of Transfigurations as McGonagall lectured on the subtleties of turning a lemon into a lime when "BLECHG!" The thought brought a grim smile to his face.

It wasn't so much that Cho was dead, this was an unhappy fact that he could do nothing about. Roger didn't regret not being there, had he been he too would've been dead at the tip of Voldemort's wand. He didn't regret not being able to die in her defense, or heroically fall for her honor, Roger knew his own strengths, he knew he was only an underage wizard and a relatively useless one at that, because while his studying strengths were formidable, his wand work was sorely lacking. His mother had told him as much when she was inquiring about his plans for N.E.W.Ts, in fact, she'd called him an incompetent buffoon who was putting her legacy as a 5th generation Ravenclaw to shame, and it was all her fault for marrying a Muggle.

Roger wasn't upset because of his imperfect charms grade, or because of the death of Cho Chang, he was upset because of the things he'd said to her mere weeks before she was killed. He'd been by for a visit in the first weeks of summer and it was then, when he'd politely mentioned his inclination towards her and that he'd like to make things more serious, that Cho told him she wanted to keep her options open. In other words 'bugger off you great lump, you're not good enough for me.'

Roger had been stunned, disgusted by her frank and unwavering dismissal of him It was a punch in the gut followed by a staggering fall down the Spanish Steps, both painful and mortifying. He'd offered her love, she spat in his face. At first he tried to reason with her, what had he done wrong, what could he do to make it up to her? A plea that had finally escalated into furious attacks on her character, vowing that she would forever remain a bitter old hag, clinging to a dead relationship.

He flooed out of her living-room in a furious burst of green, leaving her with red rimmed eyes and clenched fists. Roger mulled over the encounter for months and came to the conclusion that it was all Potter's fault. His pretty-much murder of Cedric Diggory had led Cho to believe their failing relationship was more than it could ever amount to. Then his insensitivity in the face of Cho's grief had hardened her heart against love, and the sort of faith and security that Roger was offering.

Roger never considered himself the paradigm of relationship wisdom, but he would've done right by Cho. Done anything for her. In Cho he saw something magnificent and glowing, something he was confident that no one else could. He loved her with all he had and she rejected him like rotten meat.

Now he was reduced to locking himself in his dormitory to avoid the sympathizing stares of the entire wizarding world. For once in his life, he had reporters banging down his door, and it was dizzying. The tacky, supposedly comforting gesticulations of his female housemates, inviting and disturbingly amorous, continually made him sick to his stomach. He had recently lost the love of his life to a vicious murderer, had they no respect for the grieving process? The sheer guilty agony of knowing his last words to her had been spiteful and cruel? All of this was Potter's fault.

* * *

Plates and glasses clinked cheerfully against each other as lively students ate and happily regarded the costumes of others. The first years gaped open mouthed at the display of massive pumpkins and nearly-real decorations, fluttering bats, spider webs, and a large black banner that alternated between "Happy Halloween" and "Joyous Samhain."

Halloween was the one feast of the year where everyone could be counted upon to attend. Students and teachers alike took pride in their magical prowess, displaying the most outrageous costumes and magical innovations available. Draco Malfoy, however, was not enjoying himself. Having been forced to disentangle himself from the tipsy and amorous Pansy Parkinson once too often, he longed to escape to the relative peace of the hall.

There was a wraith-like fog was snaking around the ankles of the students in the moments prior to the 'dance' which was really just an excuse for students of opposing houses to intermingle, and in severe cases grind like the idiot youth they were. The lights began to dim, their circle of illumination closing in on the head table, the pumpkins glowed in the subtle spotlighting, and as Dumbledore stood a distant rumbling of timpani announcing his impending speech. Draco rolled his eyes as every student in the Great Hall ceased conversation and stared at him, the man had always had a flare for the dramatic and this was only illustrated in the ground-light spell he'd cast under his feet, highlighting every grotesque wrinkle in his craggy face. He was dressed plainly for once, and was somehow made more frightening by the light glinting off his spectacles and obscuring his eyes – Draco shuddered. But that was the point.

The youngest Malfoy had become severely disillusioned of the Headmaster, by his third year he held no respect for the man whatsoever, and now he merely regarded him as a nuisance. The moment the party commenced he would be free to escape to his room and perform his traditional Samhain ritual without the typical primeval inhabitants of his dorm leering over his shoulder and breaking his concentration. Draco still kept to the traditions, he didn't dance around a bonfire, or celebrate the resurrection of past lives, but he did respect the new year in his own way. Every year he crawled into one of secret passages or chambers, lit a fire in a portable brazier, and sat deep into the night staring into the flames, meditating, and divining. He despised being so furtive in his religion, but it was a new world, and sacrifices had to be made.

"Ladies and Gentleman" 'Boys and girls' Draco mentally added, recounting his last speech and smiling to himself. "before the music begins and your dutiful chaperones slide off to ignore your liaisons on this festive occasion, I will begin with a story to get the ball rolling." No pun intended he was sure. The expression worn by the teachers was unanimous: mortified, impatient, and just a bit scared, Draco sympathized. Sympathized in the way that a manicured ponce sympathized with a victim of bamboo torture; some things were universally painful.

The entire student body collectively rolled its eyes - "It was a dark and stormy night, much like this one," Draco seized his moment. In the low lighting, with all apprehensive eyes on the Headmaster, he slid out of the room, keeping to the shadows until he could be sure no one had noticed his departure. The silence around him was a stark contrast to the noise of the hall, and he could not help but feel the thrill of fear as he wandered alone into the darkness. Solitude was not offered freely at Hogwarts, and it was rare for a student to find himself in a hallway without so much as a portrait: Draco relished the novelty.

"My dear Draco!" Malfoy sighed, only one person at Hogwarts would ever call him 'dear' and only due to entirely too much time spent in suspicious smoke. "Shouldn't you be enjoying the feast with all of your little friends?" Draco winced. Turning ever so slowly he found himself face to face with Professor Trelawney. It was a sight to be taken in as patiently as possible, because only then did you see that she was in fact a human being and not some horribly mutated over-large mosquito.

"Of course," she continued with hardly a pause, "I used to sneak away from all the dances – though usually in some company." Draco blinked. He really, really had no interest in the bug-woman's illicit encounters in the supplies closet. It was a thought he would have paid very good money to be rid of permanently.

"How unusual to see you out of your tower." He forced out politely, this woman made his skin crawl.

"As I'm sure you've noticed, the spirit resonates at higher frequencies on All Hallows eve. The day when the dead rise again those with the inner eye see freely."

Draco didn't bother to correct her, the woman was an idiot. Very slowly he nodded, trying not to lose Slytherin points, while expressing in no uncertain terms that she was a few straws short of a string quartet. "That's lovely professor…" He backed away, trying to disengage himself, "Surely you're also missing the feast…"

"Sibyll Trelawney lurched, and Draco's heart nearly stopped as she wrapped a bony hand around his left arm. He stood, stock still at the unexpected motion, hardly daring to breathe as she jerked. "A gift will be made, one that he cannot refuse." She was ramrod straight now, her voice, having lost the mystic quality that she worked so hard to maintain echoed throughout the dead corridor. Their eyes met, and terrified though he was, Draco could see something lurking behind Trelawney's glasses, desperate to relay a message. Her grip was bruising. "The witch of the mire holds the key to sacrifice, and the unknown servants of ash will rise."

Draco stood frozen in the terrible silence as the divination professor slumped against him, then slid to the floor. Her hand finally released its painful grip and Draco's arm throbbed. He didn't know what to say in the wake of her final pained gasp, or what to do as her head lolled to the side, knocking her glasses askew and her jaw open. The sound of a glass ball rolling across the cobbled floor broke the silence, and Draco did the only thing he knew how. He ran.

* * *

Ron curled up in an armchair next to Harry's. The fire was roaring and the common room lit with a warm glow, but as it was nearly 3 in the morning only he and Harry were there to see it. It was a quiet night in for two boys that enjoyed traipsing around the castle more than anything, but lately all the things that Harry enjoyed had become obsolete. Ron missed his best friend dearly, he didn't make friends easily, being hot tempered and impatient, but even when they were fighting, Harry had always been there, been a presence. These days he was more of a ghost, and Ron was beginning to worry. "It's getting late." He said finally, staring into the fire with his best friend, trying to see a fraction of what he saw.

"Yeah, I guess it is." Harry returned blankly, still staring off into space.

Ron was peeved; he was trying to find a way to reach Harry and running into brick walls. It wasn't that much of a surprise really, as Ronald Weasley had never made the effort to find out what made Harry tick, just as Harry had never tried to place himself in Ron's shoes, it just wasn't something they routinely did. "I feel like I haven't talked to you in weeks." The statement held all the subtlety of Professor Lockhart's ego, but Ron had never been one for subtlety in anything but chess, and he needed to know what was happening.

Harry didn't want to do this, not now, not ever. He didn't want to have these sorts of conversations with Ron. From Hermione, he expected the third degree, 'how has your scar been feeling, how many hours a day are you thinking about Sirius, Cedric, Cho? What sorts of activities are you engaging in to take your mind off them?' but he couldn't bear to have the same thing with Ron. He felt like a guinea pig, and Hermione a doctor in a white lab coat, 'ready to be dissected doctor,' 'thanks so much. Scalpel.' "We talked last weekend, had a lovely chat at Hogsmeade remember? Hermione's costume was brilliant don't you think?"

Ron had to agree, he never thought she'd make such a wonderful ogre. But then, she'd had experience with ogres and trolls having tried to turn into Millicent Bulstrode once, it was a real shame Dumbledore cut the dance off early. Hannah Abbot snuck off to use the restroom and ran back screaming. No one that rushed to the scene (the whole of Gryffindor included) could understand how Trelawney had died, and in lieu of a proper explanation, Dumbledore sent his students to bed. No! He wasn't about to let himself be sidetracked like this, he needed to talk to Harry, to communicate on a deeper level, like they did when they were younger and these sorts of things were just a game. "It was brilliant, but then Trelawney went and ruined the party. How do you think she died anyway?" So it was a sideways method of approaching the question, and colder than Iceland in Nordic winter in regards to her death, but Ron's need was great, and if the batty Divination's teacher could hear him now, she would no doubt be predicting his horrible death, post-mortem.

"I haven't been giving it much thought." He could still hear the rasp of Trelawney's voice 'as the seventh month dies' through the tinny quality of the recording glass – and it was easy to believe a prophecy had killed her. It was the general consensus of the staff, Sibyll Trelawney had made her final prophecy and no one was there to witness it. In a way he doubted he would ever forget, any prophecy made to him, and the sudden thought that she would never make another made his head spin.

"Yeah," Said Ron. He couldn't stop thinking about ton-tongue-toffees when he'd seen her corpse, or how he'd held Hermione's hair back in the Gryffindor toilets as she wretched up the contents of her stomach. "Probably a death eater shooting through the windows huh?" He was joking, or at least trying to joke, but not even Ron thought it was particularly funny.

Harry started, staring critically at his best friend, who he hadn't actually seen all year. It hadn't occurred to him that because his friends had witnessed the prophecy they thought they'd be involved, or even try to figure it out. It shouldn't have surprised him, but it did, and something wrenched inside of him. Someone got hurt every time they stuck their noses where they didn't belong. This time around, Harry couldn't stand to see anyone else die. "I don't think we should investigate this," Was all he said about the subject.

"Oh." Ron thought that Harry was over reacting. Trelawney was probably expecting it anyway.

There was nothing particularly evil about fortune telling or divining. However, because those that chose to pursue divination as a career tended to die early. The individuals that deeply explored divination were so closely linked to the spirit world that their souls tended to float away with the divine voice.

The lucky ones, people like Cassandra of ancient Greece, went mad. The unlucky ones… people like Sibyll Trelawney, weren't meant to divine – they had the gift but they had to work to tap it, they had to make sacrifices. It took a portion of her life every time she divined or had an actual prophecy. The unlucky ones were the ones that were essentially rooted to reality, and when they acted as conduits they had to fight for their souls. They always lost in the end, and Professor Trelawney had finally lost the battle on Halloween, just as thousands of prophets before her had. It was no surprise, it would have happened eventually – she was too gifted to be passed over as a conduit, but not gifted enough to survive it.

Every wizard and witch was told these macabre stories from a very young age, passed on by elder siblings, and in some moderation their parents. "Darling, if you choose this… you have to know and understand the risks…" It made for more Muggle-born diviners than any other wizarding profession, a phenomenon easily explained by a predisposition against painful and horrible death.

Ron just thought it sucked as a career path. Divinations had always been such fun with Harry, the lessons hadn't sunk in, but the hilarity had. Now of course, it was forever ruined by the image of her dead body, and the wreckage of their friendship. "Things were different when we were kids, weren't they?" He asked solemnly, staring into the dying embers of the Gryffindor fire. "Things weren't so serious? There wasn't so much at stake?"

But no answer was forthcoming from Harry, no comforting words, nor the candor which only he seemed to possess when his best friend needed to be told: "Nothing's changed, Ron." The only evidence of Harry's presence in the room was the faint snore from his armchair. "We were just oblivious then."

* * *

Marjorie contentedly slurped on her oatmeal, it was a bit runny this morning, and there was too much sugar. "Please sir, may I have some more." Came spinning into her head and she fought down a giggle – if anyone wanted more of this viscous grey slop they were welcome to it, and the sugar too. At least she could eat again, that was something. Three months of debilitating morning, afternoon, and evening sickness had reduced her to mild foods, nothing too spicy; though she'd had the most awful craving for curry last night. Which had to go unsatisfied because she couldn't rouse the house elves to make her curry at 3am; Hermione would have killed her.

Marjorie had taken to sitting entirely at Gryffindor, her fellow Hufflepuffs were still ignorant to her condition 3 months into her pregnancy (a series of concealment charms, a strong stomach muscle wall, and baggy clothing did wonders), but she was very uncomfortable among her own house, she always had been. Marjorie was a pureblood wizard from an influential family; she hadn't wanted to be sorted into Hufflepuff anyway. All of her siblings (who had long since graduated) had been Ravenclaws. She remembered with perfect clarity, the fading light over the lake and the queasy combination of eager anticipation and nerves when the sorting hat screamed out "HUFFLEPUFF" after two full minutes of deliberation on her head: she was mortified.

Today, the November sky was white instead of blue, and a light drizzle was falling on the enchanted ceiling. Hermione was muttering into a journal, scribbling furiously about various types of potions that Marjorie didn't want to contemplate for fear of a massive headache. Ron was yawning into his bacon and Harry was grinning sheepishly at him, apologizing for something. They fought a lot these days; Marjorie could never quite catch why, probably something personal. There was wild fluttering over head, morning post. Marjorie wasn't particularly fond of owls, Hedwig and Pigwidgeon were all right, but the morning post always unsettled her. Damned hormones were making her more sensitive to everything lately; during Care of Magical Creatures she wanted to curl up in a fetal ball and cry, and the scents in the potions room were enough to make her permanently ill.

Something landed in Hermione's waffles, and her addition of the Daily Prophet landed on the notebook. Marjorie jumped, busy imagining how awful Professor Snape smelled, like dead newts and saffron, she was working herself into a nauseous state. Hermione jerked away, her nose was splattered with ink, and she blinked owlishly. "Post is here." Said Marjorie through giggles, Hermione had the tendency to get lost in her work. If you didn't remind her, she forgot to eat, and if you didn't interrupt her, she would forget to fill the ink well and write with a dry quill. When she recovered sufficiently (Hermione had the good sense to wipe the ink off her face) Marjorie asked "Any progress?"

"None whatsoever. The research facilities in this school are amazing, but too much of it is censored and they don't have anything useful on what I'm researching. Honestly, what I wouldn't give to have it all computerized." Delicately shutting the notebook, Hermione set her quill to the side and picked the letter out of her food, it came away sticky with syrup and butter. "Oh, I hate when it lands in my breakfast."

"It wouldn't land in your breakfast if you kept your plate in front of you." The dripping syrup looked like strands of spun glass to her. Once at a fair that her father had taken her to, she spent an entire hour watching a glass-blower make a single ornament, staring with rapt fascination at the concentration it required of the glass-blower. Any moment the glass could explode, it could lose its shape, the amber dye could darken to black and the whole thing would be ruined, she watched it until her father had dragged her away to look at turtle-shell handbags, where she learned she wanted one desperately.

"Yes yes, I ought to eat when there's food in front of me, not when I get my work done, I know. Oh look, it's for you!" Hermione smiled at the girl who'd become her best friend and handed over the letter.

The letter had been forwarded twice. It was addressed to "Miss Marjorie Durham, Hogwarts School for the Gifted and Talented, Yellow Dorm, Scotland," from one Benjamin Larson. It was forwarded to the Muggle department of Wizarding Post, then out to Marjorie Durham, Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry, Hufflepuff Dorm, Unplottable. "Ben wrote me!" The recipient of said letter squealed, ripping open the top and reading aloud.

"'Margie,

'It came as quite a shock to me to hear of your predicament. It's amazing that you're preggers'" this she said in a low whisper as to not inform the entire school, "'despite our efforts to the contrary, and I am very glad that you told me. However, I am sorry to say that I can do nothing to help. We had lots of fun together, but I can't support you or even see you again. I'm Catholic, were my father to find out he would kill me, and I'm just not ready for the responsibility of fatherhood yet. I wish you the best of luck…' but feel free to fuck off and die."

Marjorie didn't bother to read the rest of the letter, and, still covered in syrup which no longer looked as romantic as that amber colored glass, and let it flutter to the floor. Her voice had become more desolate with every word after 'however' and her face had grown paler until she looked like a ghost. There were about three thousand things that Marjorie would have liked to say to him right now, angry mutterings about how she wasn't ready for parenthood either, how it was his faulty condom that broke, and how he was an irresponsible little bastard that deserved to die of gangrene, but she said none of it. Instead, she turned to Hermione, tears in her eyes, and buried her face in the other girl's shoulder. "Wanker." She heard Hermione spit, and started crying.

"What am I going to tell my dad?"

* * *

Post Notes: Hehe, suffice it to say that Sibyll Trelawney is insane, lacking a chromosome, a few knuts short of a galleon, that sort of thing. A few straws short of a string quartet is a personal joke.

Also - Bah humbug. Calm down. I have nothing against Hufflepuffs or Catholics – I just needed a decent excuse for some personal angst and a right bastard of a boyfriend. S'all. Besides – every guy I've talked to tells me "I would never just abandon my girlfriend like that" Blah blah blah and yet…! And yet… it happens, so it must happen to someone.


	7. Dumb

**Disclaimer:** Standard disclaimer applies of course, I'm about as close to owning Harry Potter as Harry is to losing his virginity in canon. Urm coughs – you might even say 'I'm as close to owning Harry Potter as pigs are to flying' or 'I do not, and never will, own Harry Potter. Do not sue'.

**Notes:** I've decided to post this thanks largely in part to **Lanfear1**, it's amazing just how much one review inspires me to write, and thanks very much **Lanfear1** for reviewing. It genuinely made my day. In other news – the chapter title MIGHT key you in to how I feel about this one… not that it's BAD… it's just, as far as a chapter goes, the component parts are prettier than the actual thing. Things are building up, I promise you, these things are happening for a REASON! I promise, I really do.

**Warnings: **None save potentially maudlin musings on the part of one Harry Potter. Blech.

* * *

**Chapter 7: **Dumb 

The walls of Hogwarts were singing a dirge. Outside, Harry Potter was panting with exhaustion outside the eastern courtyard, protected from the howling wind, but not from the frigid air that chilled his sweat soaked skin to the bone. His heart was pounding and his breath coming fast as he tried to regain himself under the stars. If McGonagall caught him out here she would give him detention for a week, or she would have last year. The matronly ward of Gryffindor was tired, she hadn't taken points in weeks, twice she'd caught him wandering the castle and hadn't punished him in any way. "Please go to bed Harry." Was her weary argument against his late-night wandering; far removed from the stern lectures of old and the terrifying woman that had kept him in line for so many years.

Strange things had been happening recently, strange and horrible things that weighed heavily on Harry's heart. There had been a slaughter of werewolves across Europe. Remus Lupin, a man just forty years old and the last of the marauders, stumbled into the Headmaster's office looking over twice his age, haggard and bloody, to sob out the whole sad story into a cup of tea that should have been something stronger. He spent over a week in the hospital wing before taking residence in the forbidden forest until he felt he could rejoin society as a whole. The tortures he had seen his kind endure, and had in part suffered himself, had secured werewolf forces against Voldemort, but had shrunk their ranks so significantly it hardly made a difference. Of the fifty-plus weres in the western European area, only seven remained. Harry had witnessed his father's best friend explain how many of his friends, or people that could have been very close confidants had been pelted, skinned alive, burned, drowned, martyred – selective genocide.

Another one of those private conversations to which Harry had been privy. There were things he was never supposed to hear, and heard them anyway – it was part of being a clichéd and put upon young hero. When asked, Lupin stared at the tattered hem of his robes and didn't answer for a long time. "Only those of us who had the sense to run got away." He said finally, gazing blankly at the floor. "A few stayed behind, joined the Death Eaters I guess."

"Who ran?" Asked Dumbledore after a quiet moment.

"Me."

Bile rose in Harry's throat when he thought of the implications. Anything sub-human was to be eliminated, both as a warning to other sub-humans, and to weed poor DNA out of the blood stream. Vampires would be next, if Voldemort couldn't turn them to his side with the promise of endless human blood and riches beyond their wildest dreams, only one of which he could conceivably make good on, he would methodically rip them apart and kill them with a series of clichés. Drowning and skinning the dogs, staking and burning the vampires, casually cutting down Muggles with magic, against which they had no defense. It was an extremely effective variety of psychological warfare, but a weakness to Voldemort's army.

Harry could see hope in the situation, bleak and morbid as it was. By isolating non-humans, Voldemort would drive them towards the sides of 'light' and create a stronger opponent. Giants, goblins, elves, vampires, mermaids, centaurs, ogres, and Muggles would all unite to destroy the man who would massacre them, if they thought to do so. If they could see what Voldemort was trying to achieve, but that was the human fallacy, and the fallacy of many intelligent non-humans, they were blinded by stars, or could not see the forest for the trees.

With this insight came a certain amount of responsibility, responsibility to non-human races to inform them that Voldemort would be coming for them, responsibility to humans to protect them, to guard them against joining Voldemort, responsibility against causing a panic. It would be all too easy to stand up in the Great Hall to say "Attention everyone. Ladies and gentlemen, if I could only have your attention for a moment! Voldemort in all of his hypocrisy is coming to kill us all, left unchecked he's an unstoppable force, and unless we all make the effort to integrate non-human species into our worlds, accept them as intelligent beings, yes, even ogres, we're screwed. Might I recommend you all pick up your steak knives and slit your wrists…? If everyone would just drink the pumpkin juice, we'll be spared the effort of fighting a war we can't win!" Because winning at this point would be impossible. Voldemort was spreading chaos in a world that functioned solely on order.

Professor McGonagall had handed around the roster this morning. Who would be staying on for break? No one? That's good then, I'll go home to visit my husband's grave and the son that refuses to speak to me, do you think a fire truck is appropriate for a twenty-two year old boy? Oh wait, I'm sorry, I forgot you're an orphan, Harry. He was the only Gryffindor staying on this year, under the Headmaster's personal supervision. The list this year had been longer than ever before.

For three weeks, Harry would be confined to the castle, free to slip through the statue of the hump backed witch and into Hogsmeade, with no one else. He was looking forward to the solitude, craved it in fact. The people around him were like flies, generating their own buzz that melted into white noise all around him, a cocoon of static that he couldn't escape. Lavender Brown's new puppy was a cute little fuzz ball, chocolate colored with a darling pink collar; Parvati Patil had been trying to open up relations with Ravenclaw through her twin sister, apparently there was a gorgeous boy that was in need of her brand of attention. Seamus Finnegan kissed Ginny Weasley without any provocation of mistletoe; Draco Malfoy's sixteenth birthday was an amazing hit, all of Slytherin was hung over the next day. His own friends seemed completely irrelevant, no uncovering mysteries this year, no haunting himself with dreams, absolutely no seeing Arthur Weasley dead on the floor of a dingy building. This year would be completely different, even if he had to cut himself out of it.

Harry's arms were getting numb, he couldn't feel his skin anymore, which he supposed was a bad thing, but he appreciated nonetheless. The whole world had slowed down to corn syrupy thickness, and the shadows in the world were oddly comforting. It would be a relief when he could settle down and not worry about someone jumping out of it to kill him. Would Voldemort chase him even in hell? Marietta Edgecombe approached him just after dinner; Harry stared at her and realized she was short. He had at least four inches on her, and she couldn't bring herself to look him the face, very few people could these days. He had a tendency to stare, maybe it was rude, Harry didn't care. "What?" He had asked, Marietta stared pointedly at his chin and he realized that her eyes were blue, but that was fine because he'd seen prettier blue. Sirius had blue eyes, Ron had blue eyes, Dumbledore had blue eyes, Dudley had blue eyes. There were still spots on her face, and when he squinted closely enough, he could see the faint scars of a hex that had once said 'Sneak' in bold letters, the sight made him feel oddly vindicated, and sad at the same time.

"I know," She managed before looking at her toes again, "that I am the last person you'll want to hear this from but… Harry I'm sorry." He continued staring at her blankly, having found that this made people squirm more effectively than any amount of glaring. "I'm sorry about the DA last year, I don't… I don't have any excuse for what I did, and I just wanted you to know that. And… I'm the last person that should ask but… I think you should start it up again. It's my seventh year, it would have been Cho's seventh year, and we don't have any practical defenses. Please… consider it?"

If it were meant to be appealing, it came out as pathetic and selfish, self betterment, restoring her karma if it needed to be so restored. He wanted to tell her that he found her appalling, he said "No."

Harry hadn't tried to sleep at all tonight. The moment he went back inside, he would be too warm to breathe, and he would probably wind up sleeping in an armchair during potions.

The wind dropped off, but the wailing continued.

* * *

There was no better place to look at the stars than in the great hall. Clement and peaceful, beating out midnight rendezvous spots like the astronomy tower and the far side of the lake. The last thing he wanted to do was interrupt a young couple during a time when supervision was lax and teenaged hormones were higher than the lake. 

The Great Hall, central hub of student activity was silent as a bone yard at night. No snoring portraits, no scrabbling claws on the stone floor as Mrs. Norris made her rounds, not even the dull whisper of ghosts as they materialized through solid walls to go about their lonely existences. The place was void of any activity, empty of secret passage ways, devoid of mystery, and utterly lonely during the night hours because, like so few of its companion rooms and corridors, and fewer still of its day-time inhabitants, the room held no secrets, but revealed itself to all and sunder. Three entrances, five tables, twelve hundred cobblestones in the floor, and five school tapestries hanging on one of its four walls. So at the hour of 2am Greenwich mean-time, the only sound to be heard in this most straightforward of rooms, was the soft whisper of Harry Potter, conversing with a spider.

Ever since he was young boy, Harry had been keeping the company of spiders. He had spent several minutes every morning gently picking them from his socks and removing their webs from his few possessions. When he woke, there were usually bites on his knees, but Harry never begrudged them this, because everyone needed to eat, and if the gossamer webs in the door jam were the only place they could build their homes, he wasn't bothered by neighbors in his 'room.'

Every week Petunia made him straighten his closet, which despite his meager belongings, had the tendency to become furiously sloppy, as every child's room does. Every month she personally vacuumed the spiders from their tiny niches, stripping Harry of his arachnid friends for a few days. Harry suspected that if the house elves found this little specimen of the common brown spider here, they too would immediately vacuum him up, if house elves had contraptions like vacuum cleaners. They kept this room scrupulously clean, scrubbing down the tables and floor before and after every meal, self-cleaning charms on every napkin, every table setting bleached and sanitized six times a day, it was a wonder the forks and spoons didn't simply dissolve.

Harry thought to shatter one of those miraculously sturdy dinner plates, but none had been set yet (as it was not yet four) and the noise would probably attract Peeves. In his very-much one-sided conversation with the inattentive spider, he had promised to carry him to a different location with better pickings, where he was less likely to be incinerated by elf-fire, or at best stepped on, but all Harry succeeded in doing was rolling over. The sky was too overcast for stars anyway.

He found himself longing for childhood again, no matter how horrible his had been. But then, every child's life, and every person's past is in some way horrible. He longed for the feel of soft carpeting under his bare feet, for the days when flying motorcycles and enchanted tea-kettles were just dreams, when his parents had died in a car wreck and his only concerns began and ended with escaping Dudley. Harry yearned for the remains of knickerbocker glories, and the seclusion of his cupboard, he yearned for the day that this would all be over and he could go back to being a kid and dreaming about happy nothings. It was a nice fantasy, returning to his past and dreaming like he could when he was ten, a lovely wish – like a quadriplegic man learning to run. He was Superman now.

This was probably sacrilegious in some way. Harry settled his chin on his crossed arms and stared across the table top, sacrilegious, but there was nowhere better to be. Godric Gryffindor had once sat at this very table, this centuries-old piece of oak that he was making his personal lounge chair. Generations of headmasters had eaten dinner from this very spot, teachers, staff, and the occasional student lingering over thousands of meals at this table. Harry was contentedly lying on it, his feet where Snape would be reading his addition of the Daily Prophet in about five hours, his elbows where McGonagall would take her morning tea.

Ninety-seven percent of the student body had vacated the premises for the winter holidays. However, the esteemed Headmaster Dumbledore had denied him the invitation to stay with the Weasley's this season. Dangerous, he had said, Voldemort was out in the open, sacrificing Muggles and Wizards alike, the proper wards weren't in place over the Weasley residence, a thousand and two other helpless excuses against it but the answer was final. No. Sacrilegious could eat his shorts.

The spider's name, he decided, was Horatio. It seemed a fitting name for a brown fuzzy thing with eight legs and an acerbic wit. Of course, that could've been hallucination brought on by sleep deprivation and utter boredom. Harry didn't sleep very well at night, something about the darkness made him need to be up and about, doing something, playing chess, stealing into the kitchen for late-night snacks, or at the very least pacing. Daylight hurt his eyes, so he closed them.

There was no moon, or it was very obscured by the clouds which hovered over the castle like a shroud. In either event, there was hardly light to see his new found friend by, or anything else for that matter. But Harry had always had decent night vision, his eyes adjusted quickly and he caught things that very few others would, despite his glasses. It was probably a result of eating Dudley's steamed carrots; well, vegetable of any sort: Dudley refused to eat his vegetables, raw, steamed, grilled, or fried, so Harry very generously stole them.

What he saw in the extremely dim lighting was wood grain, a spider, and two hang nails on his left hand. It wasn't much, but it beat watching the clock in the Gryffindor common room, counting the times the pendulum swung. Once and back three thousand, six hundred times an hour, eighty six thousand, four hundred times a day. He'd counted, he'd counted the stones in the floor of the great hall, and he'd counted the tassels on every pillow in Gryffindor common because his mind just wouldn't shut off at night, and there was nothing else to do.

There was a crack in the wood, an unnatural gouge put there by time, a piece of silverware, or just another recalcitrant student's weight. Had Tom Riddle, in the boredom of genius, ever done this? Harry followed it with his fingers, he traced the crevice to the edge of the table and down to the floor, the very air seemed split, the table cracked in half, the floor began to bulge up from the rift, lifting stones with great booming cracks as Harry watched it zoom across the hall like a lightning bolt. Like a deadly curse had zoomed across his head, like an earthquake was splitting the entire school in half and he was the only one to witness it. Up the wall, shaking open the doors on the main entrance, snapping the lock with a terrific 'crack' students would be screaming in terror, the whole castle was shaking down around their ears, tilting and lurching as the fissure widened and the world turned sideways – but there was no one there to scream, and Harry couldn't be bothered to find his voice in the chaos.

"CRACK!" He sat up violently, and there was no fracture in the world, leaking magma and pouring over the school, just a tiny little gouge in the table where someone's knife had slipped.

To his right sat Draco Malfoy, munching on what looked like a stick of celery, making the brittle crackle that had haunted Harry's dream. "Do you make a habit of watching people sleep, or am I just that fascinating?"

"Do you make a habit of sleeping on the head table? I think that's something worth watching, don't you?"

Okay, he had a point there, and Harry was too groggy to combat it with anything more than a stare. "What the hell are you doing here anyway? What time is it?"

Malfoy chose to ignore his questions, merely continuing to munch on his crackers and celery, it occurred to Harry that he was leaning heavily against the back of the Headmaster's chair, which was nearly as arrogant as sleeping on the head table. When had he fallen asleep, how long _had _Malfoy been sitting there, and how on _earth_ had Harry not heard him approach? Didn't Malfoy used to make an obscene amount of noise when he moved? "What Potter, unwanted this Christmas? Couldn't Weasley stand you anymore?"

"Something like that I'm sure." Harry returned glibly. The castle was empty but for a few students, orphans, waifs, and shamed children too frightened to go home—most teachers had been lenient due to stress (Snape and Binns the most obvious anomalies), but some students had nevertheless managed to fail. "What about you Malfoy? Wouldn't they let you on the train again? Or were they worried about slug-slime?"

Surprisingly, Malfoy grinned, though it wasn't a particularly nice smile. "Unfortunately for you Potter, my isolation here was completely optional. Who wants to pander to a drunken housewife?"

Harry blinked, point one to Malfoy. It had taken him a moment to remember that Lucius was in Azkaban this Christmas, and there was almost a flare of pity for Malfoy before he quashed it with memories of Lucius as a free man, horrible and cruel. Malfoy's mother must have fallen apart without her husband, though the image of a drunken housewife didn't exactly suit Narcissa Malfoy. "Somehow, I can't see your mother ever having lifted a finger, so I think she only constitutes as a drunk, not a housewife."

Malfoy glared and clenched his fist; Harry could hear his fingers crack, like the table, like his celery – a noise with everything. This whole encounter reminded him of the old western movies that Piers Polkis liked to watch. A little friendly banter, crack your knuckles and reach for your gun, quick-draw and it's all over before the first tumbleweed can even cross your path. Showdown at the O.K. Corral and all that nonsense. "At least I still have a mother."

The blonde tried to spit it out, but the jibe had been used so often it came at Harry like a blow in a pillow fight, the feathers made him sneeze, but it was all in good fun. This was pointless. "So you do. How fortunate for you." What more was there to say really? Malfoy had a mother, Harry didn't, there would be no cosmic rift in the balance of good and evil for having stated it for the umpteenth time. Luke, I am your father, when Malfoy was younger than he.

Malfoy was staring at him expectantly, waiting for Harry's wand to emerge or a fist to fly, but Harry just set his wrists on his bony knees and stared at the enchanted ceiling. His spider friend had left a bite on the knuckle of his thumb, something to itch at he supposed. He'd never realized how lovely clouds could be when nothing shone through and nothing was reflected in them, just a dull sort of mud, uninterrupted by the influence of man. It was a bit comforting, in an obscure sort of way. "Either hex me, or sit your ass down, Malfoy." There was no one around to witness this insanity, and Harry couldn't drudge up the energy for animosity, he could hardly drudge up the energy to sit up straight, but he did.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" The question was exasperated. Hermione had asked the same thing the day before she left for home, eyeing him like a curious bird, sticking her beak where it didn't belong. He loved Hermione, he might even have enjoyed her concern, but the way she posed the question was maddening, as though he should be the chipper eleven year old he'd once been. "I don't know." He wanted to say to escape her, "be a bit more patronizing and maybe we'll find out."

"My eyesight."

"Among other, far more pressing concerns." Malfoy snorted, plopping down in the headmaster's chair, somehow managing to look down his nose while looking up at Harry. "I was, however, referring to your mental capacities."

It occurred to him, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last time, that Malfoy might be working for the other side. It wouldn't be unusual for a young man to follow in his father's footsteps, nor would it be strange for Malfoy, someone he'd considered 'evil' for as long as he'd known him, to turn to Voldemort. A pureblood wizard of good, much bragged upon, heritage, a prominent family in the ministry, it would be the perfect opportunity for Malfoy to better himself in the eyes of the dark lord. Get close to Potter, tell me his weaknesses, tell me what subjects he likes, tell me which potions he's good at, I want you to be so close to him you know what sort of pajamas he wears. Not that it mattered, because Harry would've happily said 'a plain t-shirt and boxers.'

Did he care that Malfoy might turn any information against him? Of course he cared. Did he believe that Malfoy would become a death eater the moment he left school? Undoubtedly. But he was also enjoying this game. Keep your friends close and if your enemies think your shirt size is important, let them. "I'm delighted to see you're worried about me, but what makes you think something's wrong?"

"You'd have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to notice it."

"Well, given that I've claimed the title of 'most myopic,' you can clearly see, and as we're talking you can hear… one out of three's not bad."

"Intelligence jokes, that's original Potter."

Harry grinned cheekily and felt his face creak. Now that was sad, was that set of muscles so underused that they groaned in protest when he smiled now? How long had it been, a few months… and some corner of his brain, the part of it that refused to stop counting, supplied the answer. June, Sirius had died on June 3rd, today was December 27th, or yesterday was if you counted three hours in, which Harry did. Two hundred and nine days. Two hundred and nine days since he'd died; no body, no wasted flesh to give testament. Was Sirius still alive behind that curtain, everyone could hear it now, the way people whispered words that didn't exist anymore, desperately, was he still there, could he be saved? What happened to him?

The smile was dead on his face, like a man so riddled with bullet holes that his body didn't know to lie down. "Potter? You alive in there?"

"Nearly." For a moment he'd even forgotten Malfoy was there, because some things were more pressing than bantering with your childhood nemesis. And none more pressing than distracting said nemesis with utter confusion, because yes, there was something severely wrong with him, and he didn't know what it was anymore. "Thanks for waking me up. I should hate to think what would have happened."

"We would have gotten detention," Malfoy paused to roll his eyes and sneeze out a laugh, "again."

"Funny, because I was beginning to think you enjoyed our detentions together, a little quality time with the boy you love to hate, what could be more cathartic?"

"Cathartic? Hardly. Tying you to a boulder and shoving you off the Astronomy tower might be cathartic, but anything short of that falls under irritating."

Harry snorted appreciatively. This was probably something Malfoy had fantasized about since they were eleven, since the dragon incident or before – lure him up there somehow, the promise of a duel, the promise of a truce. Bring him with something irresistible, something to end all everything's, immobilize him, weight him down and – Whoosh. It would be nothing to just shove him from between the turrets. "You would finally win."

Harry could almost feel the change in him as every muscle in Malfoy's face tightened. His brows dropped, his mouth hardened, his nostrils flared, even his shoulders tensed closer to his body. Malfoy looked pinched, Harry was reminded of the rat-faced boy he'd met in Diagon Alley all those years ago. How they had changed. "I would lose everything."

"But would it be worth it?" To see him splattered on the grass below, no matter how soft the snow got, the drop would be high enough to turn him into soup. Would he think it was worth it to see Voldemort splattered on the cobblestones if it meant the rest of his life in prison? Yes, oh god yes. The analogy didn't quite hold water, if Harry did somehow manage to push Voldemort off a roof or out a window people would celebrate; it would be known as Defenestration Day, children born into wizarding families would push dummy versions of the dark lord, complete with red glowing eyes out of high rise windows. Harry was even willing to bet that small versions would be built in preparation for the anniversary of the day, climbed on by revelers and hundreds of plush Voldemort's would fall from the sky. If Harry had to spend the rest of his life in Azkaban, surrounded by dementors, hearing the death cries of those he loved… god yes he would. The end all to end all.

"No." Everybody else in the known universe might revere and adore him, but no matter how satisfying shoving Harry to his death may have been, he wasn't worth destroying a life over. Malfoy shuddered, four times he'd been to see his father in Azkaban; it was plenty. He couldn't stand the stench, he couldn't stand the sight of sunken faces, devoid of all hope, and he couldn't protect himself from any of it. They didn't need to issue prison garments, the prisoners took no pleasure in their own things anyway, they didn't need to even keep the doors locked. The dementors were gone, they were with Voldemort now, but they would be back, because it was free food, and there would always be a need of prisons, Voldemort or no. "After a month, I wouldn't feel any satisfaction. It wouldn't be winning, it would be losing everything important, all of my good memories, the thrill of beating you… all that would be left are the grease stains. You're not worth that."

Harry smiled. He'd seen it too, Azkaban, insisted on it. He'd taken a day trip to the prison out of respect for his godfather, the man he loved so much in so little time, a man he knew nothing about. He saw a single cell, with letters from children and grandchildren plastered to the walls, a single comfort in a solitary gray world, but the man inside took no reprieve in them. The man could not remember his daughter, the dementors had stripped him of her memory, and the fact that he knew she was gone was a constant pain to him. He felt the distant presence of dementors there; felt them in the very stones, which were clean and devoid of the blood and grime he'd expected. They were all gone now, but with the arctic weather and choppy waves forcibly preventing escape, it was still the best wizard's prison available. Harry had not gone to see Lucius Malfoy, someone screamed; he'd woken up to smelling salts and an offer to return him to the Leaky Cauldron, which he gladly accepted.

There were too many people willing to deal in death on his behalf; kill _for_ him or just kill him, it was all subjective, because to Harry it meant doing the same thing. With a muttered word and a flick of a wand people were willing to throw their lives away for him; it seemed a waste. More gratuitous to be sure, but maybe shoving his adversary off the astronomy tower would be more satisfying. Nothing done effortlessly was worth it: he'd tried to convince himself of that during hours of tedious meetings, grueling yard-work, restraining himself from hearty sighs and scathing comments about the competence of various aurors when all he wanted to do was curl up and die without much of an effort at all. How could anyone feel the ends were justified when the means were a meager six syllables A-va-da-Ke-da-vra – six syllables to wipe out a human life.

If Harry was afraid of himself, he was more afraid of everyone else. Isolating him, idolizing him, that's Harry Potter children, he'll save your life. Three nights ago, Roger Davies had glared at him all through dinner, despite the young woman desperately shoving her cleavage against him, one of the Patil twins (Harry still couldn't tell them apart) – 'oh poor wounded Roger, let me heal you with my hopeless infatuation and idealism.' Harry could feel the questions burning behind his eyes, why don't you do something, why aren't you outraged, how do you propose to fix this, why did you let this happen to me, to her? He didn't have an answer for any of it, he was no necromancer. Harry wanted to scream at him, wanted to make an utter fool of himself: This wasn't my fault, I can't fix this, stop making everything my responsibility because you can't get over it, she's dead, she always will be, and I didn't have anything to do with it! But the desire in him wasn't strong enough; a brief flare of pity and disgust was all he managed before he went back to his dorm to play chess against himself – another futile effort in a long list of worthless acts.

He was so lost; people expected things of him that he couldn't fathom. Without Hermione's strident shoving Harry would be hard pressed to finish his homework; people were desperate. Willing to sacrifice themselves to help Harry do what he was supposed to, but he couldn't figure out what that was, and he probably never would – he would have it handed to him. Harry caught himself wondering if the headmaster felt like this, he always seemed to have a plan, but his eyes betrayed him. They didn't sparkle like they used to, they looked so tired and strained to have people willing to die in his war only to make no progress one way or the other. Voldemort probably felt no compunctions about that, and so too had Dumbledore had to steel himself against that sort of loss – it was like identical twins playing tug-of-war, and Harry was caught somewhere in the middle of it, just as confused as everyone else. "You in there Potter?"

Harry started, it wasn't Dumbledore's blue eyes he was staring into, it was Malfoy's grey ones, and it occurred to him that he was supposed to answer in some form or another. "I… yeah." Harry's life wasn't worth Malfoy's, that's what it had boiled down to, though Malfoy tended to flare towards the dramatic. Not worth it, just another kid, I am more important to myself than you are. Shaking himself, Harry half-slid, half-fell off the table and made his way towards the main exit of the hall, the sky was getting light, so grey it was almost white; undoubtedly, there would be snow on the ground when he woke up. He felt disoriented and strange, like someone had stabbed him and he couldn't feel it, or like he was his own shadow; but then, he'd just woken up from a very horrible dream, even if his body hadn't gone to sleep. "Thanks again for waking me up. Happy Christmas Malfoy."

* * *

**Post Notes:** Have I mentioned recently how much I adore Draco Malfoy? … and I can totally see him eating celery too – it's got no nutritional value whatsoever, it's fibrous and tough and just… very much a Draco Malfoy food. Erm! Right, There weren't too many actually notes for this chapter, I did take the piss out of some 70s cultists though… 'if everyone would just drink the kool aid' snerk As always – thank you very much for reading, and PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE (because I'm begging, and I'm really bad at begging) REVIEW! 


	8. Experiments

**Disclaimer: **Own's she does not, sad this makes her. The force is strong in this one, but will she has not to own. Belongs not Harry Potter, to her. Belongs not Star Wars to her. The Jelly claims not.

**Notes: **WHEE! Three reviews on one chapter! It really made me so happy I couldn't help but post another one (seriously, I'm dancing around my living room and trying to type notes at the same time). I actually kinda like this chapter – lots of different stuff happens: and there is Ron. I always feel so bad for Ron...

**Lanfear1:** Again – thank you for your review, maybe one of these days I'll get more than a sentence from you .

**Falcon-Rider:** (since I didn't send you a personal email this will be excruciatingly long) I'm not sure what I said to make you review, but it was damned effective! Thank you SO MUCH! Really, your review made me ridiculously happy – I just want to scoop you up and dance you around a maypole. Seriously, I got the email and said 'EEEE!'. Very sad, very fangirlish, absolutely made my day. Anyway, in answer to your questions… for the most part you'll just have to wait grins. Urm, it may seem a bit unusual the way I did things between Harry and Ron, but… I don't think there's really going to BE a reaction on the behalf of Ron, it's just… why tell him? They were fighting – right? Heh. You'll see why in chapter 10 or so. Also – I really do not feel remorse about telling you this (or anyone this) Marjorie is really just there to get Hermione out of the way laughs Originally she had a higher purpose, but it's been about 2 years since I wrote her introduction and I realized (slowly) that her existence was so thoroughly and revoltingly cliché that she became somewhat… inconsequential. I wish she had some nefarious scheme, it would make her SO much cooler, but… nope. Just there to get rid of Hermione so I can pursue a Draco/Harry thing. The slash in this story is slow, I apologize, but I'm glad you've liked it thus far.

**Neverbird**I love and revere you, you know this, you wrote so many complimentary things about me I was giddy for the rest of the evening. Thank you.

**Warnings: **Character Death. And existential angst of course, but character death. I tend not to pull punches, when I'm committed to writing unmitigated angst I kill a lot of people.

* * *

**Chapter 8:** Experiments

Oh it was the perfect practical joke, nearly as good as the living swamp courtesy of the Weasley Twins, not nearly as graceful, and perhaps not as pointed, but still a damned good prank in retaliation of Zabini's tortuous shoe gag. How a Slytherin managed to charm every pair of Gryffindor shoes to run away during the night was still a mystery, they had been recovered on the lake shore, having been tossed out by the merfolk with an angry letter to the headmaster regarding his unruly students, and any evidence of Slytherin's involvement was discarded as a mystery. The gloat on Zabini's face at their bare footed toes was a dead tell though. It took three days to 'properly' dry their shoes out, three days in which they were happily excused from Care of Magical creatures, because it just wasn't the same without Hagrid.

It had taken work, begging, and some sincere groveling but Ron had managed to convince his brothers to let him test their Dye-Dung Derringers, but he had prevailed in the end, and it was all worth it. There was a small antechamber with thick tapestries, plants, and two suits of armor guarding the east entrance that separated the honey-combed staircases and narrow corridors of Slytherin territory from the main large atrium that housed the moving stairs; it was the perfect position for his triggers. About two hours prior to breakfast on Saturday, he had carefully set his trap, concealing his brothers' latest inventions behind the conveniently placed busts and gilded picture frames, aiming them at approximated shoulders, and simply waited in Gryffindor to enjoy the breakfast entertainment.

It was a tricky little charm that made the derringers shoot at the opportune moment, they were set in layers down the wide hallway, and ordinarily, were a single person to walk through they would trigger every derringer, which would never do. So Ron, for what might have been the first time in Hogwarts history, did a little research of his own, and found just what he was looking for. When a Slytherin emerged from their cave, they would trigger the very last derringer in the line, getting splattered with colored dung, and emerging into the Great Gall before they knew what happened. When the next victim saw evidence of the first crime, the second would already have occurred, catching them with the shot from the next to last derringer, and so forth until every person emerging from the hall way was covered in a variety of nasty smelling paints that refused to wash off for three days. It was absolutely brilliant, the twins would have been proud.

Most unfortunately, Professor Snape had been the very last person to emerge from his chambers, and unbeknownst to Ron, he was somewhat hung-over from Friday night self-indulgence. The venerable professor stalked into the Great Hall, covered from prominent nose to waist in lilac colored dung, and the entire school burst into gales of laughter. It was a death sentence for Ron, because the prank had "Weasley" written all over it – quite literally as each derringer was marked with a "Weasley Wizard Wheezes" label – and so too did he. Discovering that orange was definitely not Malfoy's color may not have been worth the effort, but seeing the entire Slytherin house covered a rainbow of dung was, and not only seeing but stealing one of Colin's many snapshots from breakfast was priceless, but it was how he found himself to be in detention.

Argus refused to touch the mess, and Ron was consigned to scrubbing the antechamber and the Slytherin showers every night until professor Snape was no longer purple. If there was one thing his time at Hogwarts had taught him, it was how to effectively scrub a floor the Muggle way. Wringing his rag into the bucket of luke-warm, brownish grey water, he sighed and started attacking an orange spot on Albert Finney's iron picture frame.

He wished Harry were here scrubbing with him.

* * *

Someone screamed long and loud in the confines of Ravenclaw tower, desperate and ragged, despite its pitch; but no one was able to bear witness to the noise. The sound was muffled to his own ears by shock and the hands he'd instinctively clapped over his mouth at the horrific sight. Blue light streamed through the northern exposure, illuminating a pair of feet that twisted, first several times counterclockwise, than reversing their direction and moving around clockwise once more. The scream wouldn't die in his throat, just as it wouldn't die in his mind as his eyes traveled towards jean-clad legs, up to the familiar fringes of a grey sweater, to the rope straining against the purple flesh of a neck, and finally, into the wide and bloodshot-dead eyes of his beloved elder brother. The scream went on and on in his mind, as white noise.

Mathew Davies, second year Ravenclaw, not yet permitted by his mother to stay at Hogwarts for Christmas, stood in horrified silence at the nearly black feet of his dead brother. When his brother hadn't come to greet him at the train, or hug him enthusiastically at dinner like he always did when they were apart for a time, Mathew had come to investigate. He was beginning to wish he hadn't. His mother suspected he could get into too much trouble alone, thought he was too innocent to stay in such a large castle on his own – he now knew that even toenails turned a deep purple when all the dead blood in a body settled to the bottom.

The room was icy, there was an open window, he could see his breath leaking from between his clasped fingers. That was how Roger's housemates found poor Mathew several hours later, after the welcoming feast. After dragging him away from the gruesome scene, they refused to re-enter the room lest it be haunted. Every one of those boys had grown up around the Hogwarts ghosts, but suicides tended to be irrational and violent, it would have been very difficult to sleep with the looming specter of Roger Davies in their minds.

Rumors raced around the Great Hall like static lightning, chasing each other back and forth with misinformed gusto. 'I heard that it was because of Cho. He wanted to be with her on New Years.' 'He killed himself on Christmas you prat.' 'So? It has the same romantic meaning.' 'Really? I heard he wasn't prepared for NEWTs and he couldn't focus to study, so he thought his life was over.' 'Yeah right. Roger knew that NEWTs aren't that important. You're full of it.' 'Well I heard that he's the father of Marjorie's baby, and he couldn't handle the pressure.' 'Sheesh! That's worse than mine! Everyone knows she was pregnant when she came to school. I wonder if the father was a wizard, Hufflepuffs tend not to be choosy.' 'That is the lowest thing I've ever heard! Besides! It could've been Roger anyway, they live near each other don't they?' 'Roger lives in Bristol, Marjorie lives in Reading you idiot. I'm telling you, it was all about Cho. He just… couldn't stand the pain anymore.'

The school held yet another moment of silence for the students that had passed on, this time at 8am, during breakfast. Harry watched distantly as Parvati Patil cried into her Raisin Bran the moment the silence was lifted. If only her darling crush had turned to her for help, she could have saved him. He didn't give a damn about the romantic tale behind the suicide, or any reason why, grades or otherwise (though he did have some inside insight as to the state of Marjorie's child), he only had one question, which he posed to Ron one afternoon during a hot turkey-sandwich lunch. "Do you suppose he'd've hung himself if he knew his brother would find him?"

Ron saw with horrible clarity his own brothers in that horrific scene, Bill, Charlie, Percy, Fred, George, all bloated and swollen like bread left to rise too long, "I hope not." He said.

* * *

He was surrounded by idiots; dribbling sycophantic slobs waiting to ask "how high" when he said "Jump." This displeased him; he shouldn't have had to ask. The entire world seemed absolutely ridiculous to him right now, peace protestors and whining toads slobbering on themselves in the attempt to make an impression, futile at best. He felt as though he were in a Muggle supermarket, watching mothers compromise with their screaming children over candy bars as slow women contemplated the life changing decision of whether to buy their favorite ice cream while their husbands flipped through the porno-mags on the high shelf in the back. Voldemort had reached the stage in his political life – that was to say his entire life – where all of his efforts were being thwarted at every turn. It was infuriating, and he hated to be frustrated.

In the mid-afternoon on a chilly Tuesday, Voldemort personally led a contingent of men against Azkaban to re-acquire nine of his most loyal followers, and a few mildly insane beggars that were ready to live and die for his cause just to be free of their memories – or at the very least, their cells. Azkaban was a prison for the most violent and dangerous criminals. Even wasted by malnourishment and the forced recollection of their worst memories, the majority of the inhabitants were prepared to kill for him. No number of memory charms would change that.

The prison break was his last successful campaign. In the four days since, aurors had tightened security around nearly every wizarding location known to man. There was one posted at the door of every restaurant, bar, shop, and obscure little store in Diagon Alley, and two at every venue on Knockturn. It was irritating to say the least, of course if he chose to attack any location, it would be a simple thing to over come any security post, but it was the principle of the thing that irked him. Firstly, he was interested in specific people, not the riffraff that frequented places like "Formidable Warlock Robes and Waistcoats." He didn't give a damn about terrorizing honest, hardworking wizards, just freeing them from their self-imposed Muggle chains. That wasn't to say he wasn't interested in specific people, just not the anonymous masses.

It was very difficult, no, impossible to locate his young nemesis. Not that he could necessarily be called a nemesis. A nemesis, he supposed, was someone that witnessed a mutual hatred and obsession with the other. Harry Potter was far from obsessed with him, obsessed with staying alive perhaps, and lately obsessed with defeating him, just as Voldemort was obsessed with defeating Harry, but not obsessed with Voldemort himself. Neither his motives, nor his methods. It was probably safer to say, that by true definition, his nemesis was Dumbledore, a man he was sure was thinking of him just as frequently as he thought of Dumbledore, but one could clearly defeat the other, and that made the balance of power uneven. It made for an inappropriate nemesis at best, and reminded him of his woefully inadequate scrying skills.

Dumbledore, of course, wasn't his target. The Daily Prophet was very informative if one could read around the horse-shit contained therein, if Dumbledore was in the toilet Voldemort knew about it. A man with Dumbledore's political clout did not have the right to privacy; his every action was monitored very closely. The number of concealment and distortion spells it would take to keep Voldemort's forces from discovering his position would cause suspicion, a scandal – the fallacy of proclaiming yourself in the right.

No, his problem was Harry Potter: innocent bystander in the witness protection program. Under more protection than Gringotts gold, among other things, Voldemort had not been able to locate the whelp in over two years, and it was becoming a problem. He had lost any ammunition in the previous year's annual scuffle, and Harry, it seemed, had finally learned the lesson he most needed to. He was no longer sticking his nose where it did not belong, no longer exploring, nor leaving the premises when it was forbidden to do so. It seemed that he had become inactive and complacent in his grief for his godfather: which was the worst thing imaginable for Voldemort's cause.

When one's opponent acts against his inner nature, or when that inner nature is compromised, it is made very difficult for one to anticipate his opponent's actions. Such was the case with Harry Potter, who simply refused to be anticipated, and refused to be caught out in the open.

He needed a locator spell of some kind, a way to navigate the wards on Potter's whereabouts, slide past his defenses. How was he expected to kill the boy and fulfill his duty if no one could tell him where he was? It was like shooting in the dark, occasionally he caught a glimpse of one of Potter's nightmares, but those instances were few and far between. Over the summer, someone had clearly stitched protection charms into the dormitory hangings, because he found that no student-target at Hogwarts was perfectly viable – least of all Harry Potter. He needed a solution and he needed it fast.

Just then – as though in answer to his prayers, but more realistically out of sheer dumb luck – an Orientation Research Developer 1 stumbled into his office, tripping over himself to kneel before his Lord. Voldemort lifted an eyebrow and stared at his young advocate expectantly, honestly, could no one get it right? They were supposed to knock meekly then cautiously enter with their eyes on the floor until he _chose _to acknowledge them – they were most certainly _not _supposed to burst into his presence gasping and wheezing like a landed fish. "My deepest apologies my lord!" Oh that was all wrong as well, he was supposed to wait until spoken to. "But I think we may have found a solution?"

"You think you may have?" Mocking was such a delightful game of cat and mouse, he had all the power, and was just waiting for his little mouse to surrender to his fate. He could almost feel the man's stringy tail between his imaginary claws, "Or you have?"

"I…I-I… My Lord, it is a suggestion… there is no way of knowing…"

Voldemort tapped his wand against his knee and instantly the boy shut up, head bowed and shoulders quivering with fear. "Go back to your labs until you have a definitive solution." He snapped, the boy flinched mightily; his self control needed quite a bit of work. "And remember, motivation is only three syllables away. …You are dismissed."

"Thank you my lord" and within seconds he was scrambling away lest his master change his mind. Mordred, Voldemort loved his job.

* * *

Noxious fog billowed from 20 individual cauldrons, the classroom was thick with dusky smoke that clung to surfaces and left greasy residue in its wake. At times, Harry wondered if Professor Snape chose these assignments solely for his benefit. It was a miracle enough that he'd managed to scrape out of his OWLs with an Outstanding in potions, it wouldn't have surprised him if Snape built his entire curriculum out of vindictive pettiness in response. They were impossible potions with charm attachments that made Harry queasy to think about, and this particular version of instant molding clay utilized a surprising amount of troll fat. The clay, Harry had learned the night before in a desperate cram session with Ron, was used by explorers and trackers; they poured it over carvings, runes, footprints, and spread it over vertical surfaces for a perfect mirror image of the object. It also made an excellent molding because it was water proof, but wasn't used in human residences for its toxicity when wet or decaying.

For a potion with such disgusting ingredients (troll fat, acetone, rubber plant, milkweed, sloe-stone, and ammonia, among others) the smell was surprisingly inoffensive, which was, perhaps, the only reason Harry was in class. In addition to his perpetually greasy hair and glasses, the smog tinted everything a dull clay-pink before bleaching it. It was a small wonder that Snape always looked like he had a vat of motor oil recently dumped on his head, if 75 of his potions were oil-based, and they had to bubble bubble toil and trouble for days on end. He would consider it nothing short of a miracle if his glasses took less than an hour to clean, let alone his wand. Honestly, stir this gelatinous muck eighty-seven times clockwise? And never in a million years would Snape allow them to use self-stirring cauldrons because the extra magical influences could potentially interfere with an already delicate potion.

What a crock, it wasn't as though anyone had a use for this muck around here. Occasionally a student requested the remains of potions for experiments, but no one would want this. It was a sculptor's worst nightmare, it hardened up within seconds and was near-liquid before. The color didn't keep either; the ammonia turned it bleach-white as it dried, this stuff was just a pain in the ass, and frankly, the school didn't need a large store of kwik-dry-klay, it needed a miracle.

Then again, it was a perfectly harmless potion, and a pretty much mindless activity. There was no slicing to do, no measuring, it was dumping pre-prepared ingredients into a pot and watching them boil. It gave him a few moments to think, but just as he had a second, his brain seemed to stop, like there was static blocking transmission. The entire world had slowed to a molasses crawl and all he wanted to do was start thinking, instead all he could do was see. Hermione's potion was looking perfect, three rows away from his. It was a perfect dusky rose, every bubble even, every cloud of steam the perfect consistency, he wondered if Hermione had room in her mind for anything else. Studies, studies, studies, never concerned about the moral dilemmas of life. Study study study, slice this plant here, read this book before the other one, prioritize, keep the ball rolling, don't lose inertia, don't stop to think. Study study study. It wasn't fair, Harry didn't want to be fair.

Padma Patil's potion was too hot, it was burnt and black spots were rising with every bubble like sunspots and Weasley freckles. Mandy Brocklehurst's, who'd been passed up only as a favor to her father, potion was nearly green, that was a terrifying prospect, Harry was glad he was nowhere near her cauldron. Pansy Parkinson's was a shade lighter than Hermione's, it looked like tomato soup with far too much milk. Harry's was actually passable, or that was to say it wasn't as bad as Mandy's. It was a bit closer to mauve than dusk, but that was probably due to an excess of troll fat, nothing terribly serious. With any luck, it would still set up and pop out of the molding like cake from a well greased pan.

Malfoy had a smirk on his face. Harry didn't bother to look at his potion, it was perfect, and even if it wasn't he would get perfect scores for it. Not that he had to even look down as Malfoy's cauldron was conveniently placed right next to his. Surely Snape did these things to torture him, making them work at the same table year after year, probably to see which one would kill the other – while Malfoy hadn't been quite the ass he was typically capable of, he was still Malfoy. Still arrogant, snide, still gloating over every minor victory, including the final game against Ravenclaw despite their clear lack of talent this year, and still the most irritating prat Harry had ever met. "What Malfoy? Excited about brewing up your favorite industrial-strength hair gel?"

"Ha ha Potter. Though if you want advice about hair care products, don't hesitate to ask, god knows you need the help." There was a brief pause where Malfoy gloated over his won point (as Harry had nothing to say in response to that incredibly floral sentiment), cauldrons burbled out their complaints like primordial muck oozing over its distasteful children "I created this!" It gurgled. "I suppose you're intending to make a mold of yourself – a commission from your adoring fans? So that they may remember you in countless accurate statues to come?"

Absolutely flat: "You're the soul of wit, I'm sure." Harry slid the last of the pulped newt's tongue into his cauldron and sighed deeply; that was it, let it stew, throw a random compilation of ingredients together and expect results. There were always results, it was the way potions worked, and in a sense, the way people worked. He hadn't thought of it like that before, but it wasn't really true anyway, because ingredients couldn't change their minds, they couldn't be something that they weren't, and they couldn't inflict the sort of damage that humans could, because humans threw them together. Malfoy started chuckling. It was catastrophic.

There was a hiss from his cauldron, frowning, Harry looked down as his potion suddenly turned a hard white and literally exploded in his face, spattering liquid that covered his entire front from the waste up. Harry had time to blink once and blow the gunk out of his nose before it solidified and prevented him from moving; well that explained the laughing at least. Malfoy was probably covered in it as well; a noble wardrobe sacrifice for the perfect prank, Harry found it incredibly juvenile.

"POTTER!" That was a familiar bellow, Harry couldn't even flinch, Malfoy did though, he could feel it off his right elbow. "How could you mistake newt's tongue for fire salamander's? You absolute idiot, one is white the other is _orange_! If that cauldron had exploded five seconds later, the entire class would have been cut to pieces!" So that explained a lot, salamander tongue explained everything. The salamander's spark-spitting ability caused the tongue to heat the potion to flash boiling instead of drying the potion out slowly, combined with the acetone, which stripped the potion of moisture: instant bomb. Snape was right, it was fortunate it hadn't exploded later, excess of troll fat saved the day. Was it really his fault? He supposed he could have looked more closely at the ingredients; it was pretty damned hard to miss a white tongue, Malfoy must have known he was distracted. If his mouth wasn't sealed shut by clay, he would have said something scathing and accusatory: not that he knew what it would have been.

"That is it!" Snape was hissing at them now having overcome his urge to scream, more sibilant and venomous with every word. "You two have been disrupting my class for over five years. I have dealt with it, I have ignored it, and I have hoped that the reduction of your assignment grades and endless detentions spent cleaning out the store closet would teach you some manners, yet your supreme idiocy never fails. Are you both so utterly oblivious to the danger you just put your classmates in? Follow me, and be quick about it. If you two don't…" Harry could finish the rest of the speech by rote as he and Malfoy trailed sheepishly behind Snape. He trusted that none of the other students would revolt, though it was (and for some sadistic reason always had been) a Gryffindor and Slytherin class, fear of Severus Snape kept even the most recalcitrant students in line.

* * *

**Post Notes: **Hehe – I really DO like that chapter, we get to hear from Voldemort too (every once in a while when I don't have anything else to say, he and his naziness pops up). Unfortunately, by killing off all of my characters, I find I don't have many avenues for… how should I put this, spreading my story around so eventually it will narrow down to mostly Harry/Draco stuff, be it slashy, argumentative, or political.

Also! About that thing… the Orientation Research Developer… Don't ask, I'll just pretend I know what I meant when I wrote that. Probably a recruiting office for young death eaters, exactly which propaganda works best on which communities, alternate effects of the Dark Mark etc. (hey! That's not bad for complete bull).

As always – please please please review for me. Not that you can probably tell (believe it or not I've got like… 30 chapters of this story written) but it makes me more productive and gives meaning to my life. (yes, that's pathetic, yes, I realize it, no I don't care). So just drop me a line – if I'm a sick and twisted pervert for writing slash, let me know, if I'm god on high for writing slash, let me know? If you really just want to tell me about your afternoon math class, LET ME KNOW! …please? Thanks for reading!


	9. Ambitions of a Dead Ballerina

**Disclaimers: **wince I do not own Harry Potter… no no! please! Please, don't break my thumbs, I'll say it willingly, I promise! "I DON'T OWN HARRY POTTER!" …if I do there'd be more sex.

**Warnings: **If you fear character death – this is not the story for you. The next three chapters are sad – this one made me sob while writing it… it was quite awkward, I was in a fancy restaurant.

**Notes**: laughs Oh WOW! Uhm… I just realized this doing the HTML for the previous chapters… (I've been lazy) but there's a picture frame with a photograph of Albert Finney in chapter 8 apparently giggles. Right. If you don't know, Albert Finney is an American actor, he was recently in the movie "Big Fish" with Ewan McGregor. Right – now that's out of the way, I don't own him either and that was entirely unintentional (made me giggle though).

**In happier news:** WHEE! Five reviews from Chapter 8 – Guys, I love you I Really REALLY love you. **Falcon Rider: **Good – I'm glad you liked it, I worked hard on that potions scene… for some reason I am particularly fond of Trolls as potion ingredients, no idea why. But I'm glad you enjoyed that. **OldEnough**You know – I'm not sure either. . **Luzzle****-Anne: **You are too kind, I'd be more than happy to settle for minor deity grins. Really though – thank you very much for your review, I have put a lot of work into this… I think I did the math one day and estimated around 744 man-hours into this monstrosity, it's good to … I guess, see that you appreciate that and so for this chapter (I think my favorite chapter of them all) I'm going to dedicate my almost-complete lack of self-criticism to you and your very very kind review. **Neverbird** Heh, until you bestowed your most fitting 'angst' label on Twasits I never really thought of it as particularly angsty – maybe apathetic, or maybe I was deluding myself. In any case, more extreme angst (really, this time I mean it) on the way – and really… thanks again for reviewing me, the first time and again, I can't tell you how much you've helped me. And finally, **Imperator Romanum: **Because I'm far too flattered to answer the praise, I'm going to answer your question instead: I'm actually not sure when the attraction begins laughs I have 30 chapters of this thing written and I honestly could not tell you where it began, but I promise you there is attraction. There will be Harry/Draco goodness before the year is through, I promise you. Hee, tenterhooks, I really like that word.

And so friends, as per your request(s), I update.

* * *

**CHAPTER 9:** Ambitions of a Dead Ballerina 

He wasn't cold. It was raining fairly heavily; too warm for snow, but cold enough to see his breath caught in the thick, foggy air. His shoulders were drawn, hunched over against the wind, his fingertips clutching at his elbows like it was the end of the world. But he wasn't cold. Just a little tired, and a little sad.

This made perfect sense to him. A great many things made perfect sense and this was no exception. But it was just so damned bizarre. Thinking about it, his head felt like it would float away and fall off at the same time, there was no _reason._

_"Draco Dearest,"_ the letter began, _"Gringotts has frozen our assets pending an investigation on our home. I'll be perfectly blunt my darling: your father has escaped and the aurors suspect me of harboring a fugitive. I wish I could say I know where he is, but Lucius has not seen fit to inform me of anything in the years since your birth, and in this tradition did not inform me of his plans during my last visit. _

_"The manor and its contents are yours. The deed was written by Junius Malfoy to the firstborn son of the Malfoy line, which until yesterday was your father, and now is you. The original deed, and several reproductions thereof are kept in the vault behind the parlor crest; only you can open it. Your blood will know the rune. _

_"We have nothing Darling. Our accounts, our income, our inheritance, traditionally kept in the Gringotts vault has been confiscated until further notice. Do not expect it returned to you my darling. But Gringotts has no claim to our land: fight them._

_"You were the joy in my life. My singular refuge in an unhappy marriage – an apathetic marriage. As I'm sure you've been told, my relationship with your father was arranged by your grandparents, and while Lucius and I have come to regard each other with some fondness, we were never 'in love' as your romantic notions would have it._

_"In my youth I had hopes of being more than what I was. It was never my intention to become this, a mindless drunk whose only thought is my next bridge game – oh yes, I know what I am to you. I wanted a life, I had aspirations and dreams, I remember them faintly, remember having them, but what they were…. When I married your father they just got farther away and harder to find. But I never wanted to be this. _

_"I didn't understand, or I didn't care to know about our – Lucius's political affiliations. I was unaware of our involvement, or at the very least oblivious to my own contributions to His cause. You know who 'he' is of course, and so did I; it was no excuse._

_"Your father raised you. I was responsible for bringing you into this world, but he was the first to hold you, and once you were here I ceased to be involved. I could not have asked for more in a son, and perhaps I should not have spoiled you as I did, God knows Lucius has no self-control. Oh yes, I know he appears composed on the surface, but he is no more capable of handling disappointment than you were at age four. Living with him for so many years has been a violent trial and error. Though he never struck me, several of our former house elves (did I tell you the aurors made me set them all free?) suffered greatly. You may share your father's distaste for house elves, but the wretched things are living creatures: it is not for us to decide their fates. _

_"I wish it had been different, but before your birth, before your conception we agreed. If my child was female, she would be mine to do with as I pleased, and we would try again for an heir. Clearly that was not the case, and I do not regret not having a girl, but I am sorry. I'm sorry for everything. I'm sorry for neglecting your childhood, for being absent in your youth, and even now. You are your father's son, but you are mine as well, so it doesn't matter who we were: be your own man. _

_"You have a chance, Draco. You have more opportunities to be yourself than either of your parents ever did. You have a future, the potential to decide your own fate before the inevitable happens. Choose wisely. If you should follow in our footsteps, in Lucius's footsteps, do so with the knowledge that there is no escape. Once you choose your course, there is no going back, your actions will determine everything for you, so think, Draco – act carefully. Don't make my mistakes, don't float through life pretending everything is perfect. Contest everything, form your own ideas, remember who you are and where you're from – the good and the bad. _

_"Draco, I was never able to make my own decisions. I have been going along with other people's opinions for the thirty-nine years I have been alive, I don't want the same to happen to you. I don't want you to be subject to the will of others, I don't want you to be ignorant of executive decisions all of your life. Your father will try to contact you, of that I have no doubt. When he does, remember what I've said. I know that you admire him, but keep your head clear. Lucius is the horrific result of bad parenting and a totalitarian political career—it's time to start making your own decisions instead of acting solely on his._

_"It's time to grow up my darling._

_"And Draco… I love you."_

The second letter arrived the next morning. This one was stuffed into a black envelope and written in anything but his mother's tightly packed scrawl. _"Dear Mister Malfoy,"_ it read, _"We regret to inform you that your mother, Narcissa Malfoy, has passed away. The results of our autopsy reveal that she poisoned herself at __2pm__ yesterday afternoon. Please contact us at your soonest available convenience to arrange funeral rites and a burial ceremony, or other disposal of the body. We are sorry for your loss. _

_"Sincerely Elizabeth Garoddy, Director of the Department of Afterlife Regulation, the Ministry of Magic." _

It was significantly shorter than the first, but it made an impact that his mother's letter just hadn't. The lake lapped at the toes of his boots, soaking through the leather and numbing his toes. This was no surprise because all of him felt numb, his fingers, his toes, his ears, every inch of his epidermis felt anesthetized. Even his mind. Was this dying? Was he actually freezing to death out here, or was he simply in shock? Not that either alternative really mattered. Dumbledore gave him the time to put his family to rights, "As much time as you need" he said. Draco hated that he meant it.

How does one organize pallbearers for the funeral of a reclusive felon's wife? Should he send out invitations to the funeral, or just… rely on the network of 'dark' wizards to relay the news to the right people? How does one do anything when one's entire world is rubble?

* * *

Albus Dumbledore, long time friend and mentor sat tailor-style on the head of a gargantuan Muggle. There was know way of knowing that the man was Muggle of course, because he was grey as a troll and five times as large, but somehow he knew. The headmaster was holding a great water pipe between his legs, occasionally sucking on the tip and clearly pontificating on the meaning of life. Severus marveled at this, he had never seen a field of daisies quite so large as the one he was standing in, they stretched for miles, as far as the eye could see and into the green sky. "Remember what the dormouse said." Dumbledore said this with great importance, in his abrupt little way, startling Severus from his admiration of the cheerful flowers, what was it they were singing? 

A dry and caustic wit floating from the flowers gave him the answer, "Feed my head?"

"Whatever for my dear boy? Your head is quite sufficiently large!" And so it was, for it had grown nearly half the size of the Muggle's. "No no, not at all… The dormouse said 'COCKLEMEEPMEEPEMEEPMEEEP!'"

Severus Snape opened his eyes and groaned at the infuriating noise coming from the bedside clock… if that wasn't the strangest damned dream he'd ever had, he would eat his hat. Vulture and all.

* * *

The funeral was lonely, and more desperately sad than he thought it would be. Certainly, he felt worse for himself than anyone else, but his mother's death had managed to wrap a black ribbon around his heart and it was slowly squeezing, tighter and tighter until one day it would burst. There were no tears at Narcissa Malfoy's funeral, and no one to witness their lack. The coroner had conducted the autopsy, shipped the body to the funeral home where it was locked in preservation spells for three days while Draco did paper work. 

His mother had arranged everything for him. Before her suicide she had gone to the trouble of buying her own casket with the last of her dowry money, informing the funeral services of precisely where she wanted to be buried, deciding her will and leaving everything to her son, and even informing him of the flowers she would like to have at her funeral. She had made it disgustingly easy for him, and he hated her for it. He was not expected to grieve, he saw that the moment he saw the casket, simple, unadorned wood with highly polished handles, saw the list of people to inform of her passing, saw the flower arrangements she wanted delivered from the florist. In twelve hours, the entire affair had been arranged and decided upon, she pre-paid for everything.

That night, Draco slept in his own bed, in his own home, feeling the emptiness of the place, it was lonely and barren – he felt a strange sense of homecoming and comfort in that, but more-so, an acute longing that he could not define. He missed his mother dearly; after all, she was the only woman he'd ever had any respect for.

He stood alone atop the hill where her tombstone would rest, having personally levitated the casket to the grave site and gently placing it in the freshly dug hole. That was it, a hole, not a gravesite, not a final resting place… a hole in the muddy ground. No words were to be said, there was no one to read a passage, self written or otherwise: there was no one here and the silence was oppressive. The glorified spot was decoratively adorned by simple white calla lilies –he found this to be cliché, which was probably the point.

His mother might not have been the most driving force in his life, but they had shared a joke or two, one could hardly avoid doing so living in the same house with a person for sixteen years, though it was a very big house. Once, when Lucius was away, Draco could not have been more than seven years old, he'd crawled into her lap, forcing her to juggle him, a cup of tea, and an encyclopedia of garden flowers. She always liked calla lilies, because they looked like champagne flutes, beautiful, thin, delicate champagne flutes. Draco liked whirlygig amaryllis the best because of the name. "Don't Muggles come up with the grandest names for things mother?" "Yes sweet heart, they really do."

He had learned a new Muggle word just days ago, 'light bulb' flip a switch and this… buzzy thing called electricity makes it light up like 'lumos.' He had been enthusiastic about the concept, the potential of electricity was somewhat similar, if not entirely as useful, as magic – he wanted to tell her the moment he got here, but suddenly couldn't. He hated her for dying, hated her because he didn't want her to be gone from his life yet, and hated her for layering all of this responsibility on his shoulders when he could have been happy continuing life in ignorance.

The hill was completely empty save him, even the two proletariat schmucks in rented Armani's apparated away the moment they could – leaving the site completely devoid, leaving him to move his mother's corpse from the manor to the gravesite on his own. None of his mother's friends had shown up, none of his father's associates had come to say their goodbyes or give their apologies. Draco doubted they would, there were still Aurors camped outside the manor, and some at the bottom of the hill, marking its grassy confines in four points. 'I hate you' He wanted to say 'I hate you for leaving me here like this, without any money, without any support or help, I hate you!' but all he said was "I love you mother." And walked away.

* * *

He ducked and swerved out of the way of something entirely imaginary, looping around and chasing his invented assailant. Sweat ran in rivulets from his eyebrows to his temples as he dove racing the wind to the ground, then pulling back at the last second, rolling out of the dive in a fantastic barrel roll that saved just enough momentum to shoot him back into the sky where he belonged, with nothing but the air. He pulled his knees nearly to his chest, laid flat, clutching high on the handle and shot through the air, tucking his feet in and bulleting through one of the goal hoops, he was just barely small enough to still fit. Thin and lanky, the only thing he'd gained was height and enough weight to keep him alive through his growth spurt. 

Harry hovered at an altitude where oxygen was in short supply and took a deep breath, filling his lungs with what little there was. That had been the perfect maneuver, and the hard twist back through at the end had been a crowning achievement in his Firebolt's operating history, the absolutely perfect Keeler's Stitch; it was almost liquid! But Harry had taken no joy in it. There was no exuberant whoop as he pulled through to recognize his success – congratulating himself on not braining himself on the goal post. He was breathing with some difficulty, but after a series of dizzying feints, loops, and dives he would be hard pressed to find a man who wasn't.

The earth below him was white and frozen. It hadn't snowed in days, but the grass was frosted and even the dirt beneath the risers was a hard grey, like stone. Everything in the world was carved out of marble, it was an entire universe of slick grey nothing rising into a bleak white sky. Even Hagrid's cabin, which he could see clearly from this height, seemed devoid of life.

One of the staples of his childhood had been that cabin, there was always smoke billowing from the chimney, no matter the time of day, always a light and warmth radiating from the place, some tangible emotion that Hagrid, unlike any other human, was capable of projecting in spades. Today, however, there was no sweet smelling smoke wafting from the chimney, nor light in the windows, because Hagrid was on another peace delegation to the giants. One last chance, it was one last struggle to cross the barrier made by centuries of persecution before they went to war, because while Hagrid was no brilliant tactical mind, they could not afford to lose his unique perspective for the upcoming massacre.

Harry had taken to calling it a massacre, of course, because that is precisely what he was expecting it to be. Neither side would win; Voldemort's army would roll in massive tidal waves of spells and manpower until it crashed against the walls of Hogwarts. Blood would spill, people would trip over the corpses of their dead comrades to create another loss on the other side to pay vengeance for their unfortunately dead loved ones. It would continue for days, weeks, months perhaps, until finally Dumbledore or Voldemort was dead. An all out war where thousands of people were fighting at the behest of two men, Harry felt like he was the rope in the middle of a heated Tug of War, yanked in different directions, and used as the catalyst to drag one side into the mud. His only consolation, perhaps a vindictive one at that, was the winning side's responsibility to clean up after themselves. Clearing the wreckage and carnage would be gory months of repentance for the battle, well deserved on both ends;

Imagining a kind soul like Hagrid wade through the wreckage of humanity pained him; imagining Minerva McGonagall collecting hundreds of blood and sweat drenched enemy wands and the wands of the dead to be sorted and shipped back to their families made perfect aesthetic sense, cataloguing, labeling the sticks of wood as though they still mattered. But where he would fit in… would he be a figure head leading a third of an army against Voldemort's troops, an amateur in battle gear; would he be kept in a locked, heavily warded, closet with padded walls for the duration of the battle to be found by any surviving party, would it all end like this? Would he survive it just to see the entire world empty, cold, and alone as cliff-side granite? It was so very cold.

Harry shivered fiercely, and wiggled his toes to get circulation running in them once more. His face and fingers had become chapped in the freezing wind, it was difficult to peel them from his broom handle and flex his hands. His teeth had been rattling all along. Who knew how long he'd been out here, or why. He hadn't worn more than a jumper and wool slacks out, his cloak and scarf got in the way of flying, but now he was regretting the decision not to wear mittens, there was no snitch to be caught here. Slowly spiraling towards the ground, breathing richer, warmer air as he did, Harry sighed heavily. He had accomplished nothing but a horrific day dream, and his head was cloudier than the January sky.

* * *

So I asked my mommy what she wanted to be when she grew up, and she said "Well… I guess back then women didn't have all the opportunities they did now, so I wanted to be a nurse." I gleaned from this that my mother is no ordinary human being, and said "Well that's crazy, because I wanted to be Lara Croft." I don't know what Narcissa Malfoy wanted to be when she was small, and adorable, and Narcissa Black, but I honestly think she would have been an aspiring ballerina. Ergo the chapter title. My only qualm with this chapter was the letter, really, I don't think I got across the feeling of… hopelessness, acceptance, desperation? I don't know. Snape was... some levity in my absolutely SAD chapter - the song is, of course, Jefferson Airplane. 

If you haven't figured out this wasn't part of the story – who am I to stop you from reading my drabble? Now review it. …please?


	10. Chess Master

**Disclaimers:** I don't own it, don't sue me. Or do because it will irrevocably cost me anything I have worth living for.

**Notes:** You're going to hate me for this chapter – please feel free. It's irritating, and I wrote the most important scene sitting in a Starbucks – hell, I asked the old lady in line in front of me to beta a paragraph. To those of you that reviewed chapter 9 (Please note that I say this with the deepest irony) thank you so much, you have my undying gratitude. To those of you that didn't – thanks for reading anyway. Onward ho.

* * *

**Chapter 10: **Chess Master

"Shwick, shwick, shwick…" the sound of his wand delicately tracing his toenails, shearing them off at the top. It was a careful little charm, if he wasn't concentrating he could slice the top of his toe off, and while Madam Pomfrey would happily re-grow it for him – again – he preferred not to suffer the embarrassment. Some things were better done the Muggle way.

Toes were such an interesting part of the body, they seemed so useless by comparison to things like the heart, and the liver, even useless by comparison to the fingers, their primary counterpart. But they were a vital part of the foot – the balance of the entire body rested, in large part, with the toes. Sure, the ear kept your equilibrium, kept you steady, enabled you to hear the world around you, but without toes, that world would be very boring, because you'd be hard pressed to walk anywhere new. No one had much of a respect for toes, but Dumbledore did, such a great respect, in fact, that he had a sixth toe on his right foot. In truth, he had a deep respect for everything human.

That's what he understood, he understood people, understood who they were and how they thought, at a glance he understood how best to treat people. He'd made it a life study, watched his classmates as they studied, and charmed the O.W.L proctor half way out of her frock. He passed with 'Outstanding's across the board: it was the dubious benefit of understanding the teacher better than the content.

Albus Dumbledore had never flown by the seat of his pants, he believed in being prepared, for everything and more. There was something to be said for preparing for elephants when one heard horses, but then, there was something to be said for squishing peanut butter between your toes, and something to be said for everything else. One could never know with absolute certainty what was next; it made living so wonderful and difficult, but being prepared never hurt.

The problem, however, was what to be prepared for. He felt utterly out of his depth with this thing, surely he had the support of at least one of the remaining werewolves in Europe, but Albus was hopeless at understanding and otherwise communicating with alternate species'. Human he could comprehend. Centaurs, Merfolk, were-beasts, they were part human, of equivalent mind, even Muggles, they all thought the same way. Muggles were too often the subject of the war, for land, or gold, and while it was strictly _about _them and their continued existence as free beings; they could have no part in the battles. They would be slaughtered one by one by foes that they could neither see nor defend themselves against; or their nuclear missiles would destroy the entire world to rid it of magic and life would have to begin again from the charred remains of mutant cockroaches and dead-water.

But it was the giants, the vampires, the acromantualas, and the goblins that would define who won this war. Anything with human or near-human intelligence could be asked to participate, because they too knew the consequences of magical war – the endless fields of barren land where snow was acid and patches of earth melted into obsidian under the siege. He had sent Hagrid on one last desperate feilding mission to the giants. Without them all would be lost.

In the war against Grindenwald, the only significant thing that Dumbledore had done was shove a friend out of the way of a killing curse and retaliated, it was war, everyone did it, and the only difference was the importance of his friend; the last surviving member of a truly aristocratic family with lineage dating back to Merlin. He was awarded a shiny First Class Merlin badge and the grateful congratulations of the family and historians – he'd saved a piece of living history nearly as priceless as the Mona Lisa, a piece of history that died four years later of a disease that would come to be known as cancer. During that time, however, Dumbledore had always related war to chess, it was easy to see how tacticians saw it, and how chessmen represented groups of people, but over fifty years later, he had changed his mind. War was not like chess at all. There were two vital differences that glared at him mockingly, just as he was glaring at his own set of wizards' chess. The first, of course, was size, on a chess board, both players are granted sixteen pieces to do with as they please, there are no unfair handicaps; no player beginning with fourteen while the other has eighteen, no, the course of the game was as smooth and easy as set pudding with both sides equal, skill the only determining factor. The other, was variety. Chess pieces could naturally move in varied ways, but there were some purposes for which a chess piece hadn't yet been invented, and some for which the game was a fool's pursuit. The king was exposed and vulnerable from the moment the first piece moved, if any tactician were to make the same mistake, the war would kill them all.

So it was the uncertainty of this, Voldemort's army and his own, that Albus Dumbledore sat contemplating. It was a series of unfathomable decisions that nothing in his past had managed to prepare himself for. And that was another thing about chess—he had yet to choose his king.

* * *

"Hey Hermione! Look at this!" Ron's call came from outside Honeydukes as he peered through the window at their all-new merchandise. Hogsmeade visits were scheduled with the interest of all parties in mind. The teachers got a monthly reprieve from their older students, the students got a chance to enjoy the town and its freedoms, and storeowners got a chance to display their finest wares to an audience with limited options, it was very economically sound for the little village; possibly their only means of survival.

Tiny little winged hearts and sparkles of red confetti struggled madly to stay afloat as they were buffeted by the freezing February gale. Most couples were curled around each other, sharing latte's in Madam Puddifoot's, or in the Three Broomsticks, sipping warm butter beers and munching on soda bread; cheerfully ignorant of the whipping wind and icy frost that crept up on every window in town. Ron, however, was not so fortunate as his scarf threatened to strangle him and the hood of his cloak kept coming up to smack him in the face. Hermione looked no better, her bushy hair was whipping around her head like a cyclone, occasionally hitting her in the eye, and her skirt kept threatening to rise; not that Ron was complaining. Marjorie, however, was complaining, bitterly and loudly, her hands were wrapped protectively around her abdomen, protecting her growing child from the permeating cold. She was shivering violently under four layers of wool. "I don't care what they're selling," she managed through chattering teeth, "can we just go inside?"

Which is how they'd found themselves inside Honeydukes as Hermione rubbed Marjorie's back briskly, trying to warm her while Ron marveled over their new stock. He felt a bit of a hanger-on, watching as Marge and Hermione giggled over the string mints: now in three flavors, including mint-chocolate. This wasn't his intention, of course. In fact, one cozy night in the Gryffindor common room where everyone was minding their own business, particularly Harry who'd become all-too-adept at minding his own business, he'd leaned over her and muttered into her Arithmancy text, "Hey Hermione… do you want to go to Hogsmeade with me this Valentines?" and that was that. Whether she had missunderstood him, or liked him too well to let him down but not well enough to be his official date was still a deeply confusing matter in Ron's mind, though he fervently hoped it was the former because she said, "That would be fantastic, do you mind if we bring Marge, she'll be all alone this Valentines."

It was a question posed in a way that made all arguments moot, because not only was it pointedly _not _a question, but it would make him an insensitive ass to refuse her. He'd considered very carefully sending her a Valentine, but this was Hermione, his best friend and the woman he sat next to every morning at breakfast and had for the last five years – he didn't think he could stand the look that would come over her face; first quizzical, then her eyebrows would draw together and she would sigh, and explain to him in no uncertain terms that she was unavailable and he not good enough. So here they were while Marjorie and Hermione kept their confidences and Ron ran his fingers through the cockroach-clusters. It was like this at home too, Ginny, being a girl and worse his sister was completely unfathomable as a human being, but his nearest age mates had a world their own and were completely absorbed in it, and each other; only stopping to regard him when they needed someone to eat something that was potentially detrimental to his health. Ron learned how to get along alone until he met Harry and Hermione; if he was a little jealous now it was no surprise, his best friends were wandering in opposite directions while he remained stagnant: he was lonely.

"Eww." He heard Hermione say, and turned to see that the expression on her face was one of abject disgust. "How could you be craving pickled marshmallows? I've never even heard of it."

"It's not!" Marjorie's defense fell a little flat, because she thought it was disgusting too, but it's what she wanted. "I just want something that's sweet and sour and salty at the same time… that's not so unusual."

"Ugh, try an acid pop." Ron handed her the radio-active green lolli from a spinning rack in a corner of the store and made a grimace that Hermione shared with him. At least they still shared similar tastes. "So… I was thinking that we should get something for Harry, then all go get cocoa." He tried casually, poor Harry was locked away in the castle after that stunt that Malfoy pulled in potions, his Hogsmeade rights revoked for the remainder of the year as punishment. Ron thought it was cruel and unusual, Hermione gave him a lecture on how she could see why Professor Snape insisted on it because detentions had utterly failed with them.

"That's a wonderful idea! Do you have anything in mind?" Hermione laughed as Marjorie sucked on the acid pop for the whole of three seconds before the fizzling bitter taste hit her like a rock and she spat it into the trash can, paying the owner the three knuts anyway.

"Well, I have an idea… come see." Ron led her to a column of two-foot-long, caramel colored, rope-like candies in individual wrappers that were next to the storage room door. "They're Bertie Botts Surprise Strings – all the flavors in a pack of the beans, in one fun string," he quoted, "The color is supposed to be misleading."

Marjorie joined them, this time munching on some lemon rind brittle, for which she'd paid another ten knuts. "Poor Harry is probably bored silly… I think he'd like it." She said around a sticky mouthful.

Ron grinned, "Nah, he's writing his history essay for Monday."

"Ron! That was due three days ago!"

"Whoops… I guess someone should have told Harry that." He was utterly unrepentant, at least Harry would get _some _credit for the essay, but he was so absent-minded these days it was easy to take advantage of him, and Ron was a little sulky – though it _had _been an accident. "But really 'Mione, what do you think?"

"Do you think Harry'll like it?"

"Yeah! Of course he will, surprise, adventure, a few disgusting bits of gooey candy… what's not to love?" Marjorie blanched: another happy accident.

"Ron, I don't mean to insult you," no sentence that started with that disclaimer could possibly be a good thing, "but I wonder, are you giving Harry things that Harry wants, or are you giving things that you want Harry to have?"

Ron shrugged, "A little of both I suppose, what's the difference?"

"Well… do you remember his birthday when you gave him the Chudley Cannons – Everything You Could Ever Want to Know and More?"

Okay, she had a point, Ron's wince proved it, even he realized that it wasn't the ideal birthday gift for someone in Harry's state, but he was trying so desperately to be normal about the whole thing that he didn't know what to do. Last year's little endeavor had left scars that he couldn't bear thinking about… those brains… those slimy, hideous, cold, violating brains… "Well… that's true but it—" And all hell fell into his lap with a POP!

Ron's heart froze. The storage door was nothing more than a few beads tied onto strings, which was fortunate because he shoved Marjorie through it and whispered "Trap door." to Hermione before shoving her through too.

Hermione's gasp was the second to last sound he ever heard, the very last being "Avada ke—" from the Death Eater that barged into the room a split second before. The masked man didn't even notice the girls' disappearance because Ron was falling backwards through the beaded curtain in wide-eyed death, disguising the rattle of frantic beads.

* * *

There was a small marble ball on the headmaster's bureau where there hadn't been before. Or had been before, he just hadn't noticed it – it was a solid grey. The tapestries fluttered with the blinds, Fawkes was no where to be seen, metallic gadgets and knickknacks spun and whirled on individual stands that shone in the afternoon light like little spots of affection. Thick grey marble.

Harry found himself a statue in the Headmaster's office as a torrential rain of emotions not his own pounded down on him. Ginny was clutching at his right arm, molding the flesh to fit her helpless firm grip, and soaking through his flannel where her face was buried in his chest. Marjorie was on his other side, gripping him with half the strength and crying twice as hard; until now her desperate bouts of sobbing had been unwarranted – that girl's skirt was unmistakably the wrong color, it clashed viciously with her green top and she couldn't stand it! Today, however, her deep and silent tears were entirely justified; Harry wished that he could share in them but his tear ducts seemed broken.

Hermione, pale-faced and violently flushed in the same moment, had drawn her knees in; her shoulders were hunched over her body in wretched anguish: she was silently wailing into her hands. She flinched away when Harry set his hand on her shoulder. Before it was stolen by Marjorie. Ron used to help him with these things, he used to be there when Hermione needed a good cry over Viktor, or when Harry was being an absolute ass to them both, but he wasn't here this time around: that was rather the point wasn't it?

Mrs. Weasley would be arriving soon, he could almost feel the look on her face; the grief was tangible, like he could reach out and wrestle it away if either of his arms were free. When she arrived, he would hug her: at the very least he intended to, whether or not he would, or she would let him, was a matter of yet to be determined by consequence. Harry imagined her sitting in the cluttered and cramped living room, carefully knitting or darning a pair of socks when the clock on the wall chimed – would she have looked up, or would she assume it was Arthur, coming home early from work, Bill leaving the museum to head to a dig, Percy leaving his desk to snag a bite of lunch, or the twins, testing a new prank in the apothecary of Knockturn alley, was it one of her many family members in transit? Would she have seen Ron's hand moving suddenly from "Hogsmeade" to "Mortal Danger!" or would she ignore it to finish her delicate weaving? Did she miss seeing her son die on that clock, or had she witnessed it helplessly?

Harry thought it was rather ridiculous to have a clock that said "mortal danger" on it, if there was nothing he could do, he would rather not know – it saved a lot of speculation and heartache. "If I had had been there, if I had been more protective…."

His fingers were tingling, surely there were holes in his flannel where Ginny's Quidditch-hardened fingers were crushing it. Harry hadn't reacted yet, he was sure. This was nothing like Cho's death, this was close, this was personal, this was the murder of his best friend, the first peer he'd ever liked, and the first that liked him. Not some abstract crush that was dismissed over the course of a day, this was _Ron_.

At three o'clock that afternoon, the headmaster sent Dobby to collect Harry and send him to the all-too-familiar office. Ginny had thrown herself at him, and he reflexively placed a hand on her hair. "Harry… I have bad news." This office never held good news. It varied in degrees, not everything in life could be tragic, but the news from this office was never good. "There was a Death Eater attack on Hogsmeade today, five people were killed…" he was stalling, Harry didn't appreciate it, he wanted the facts, and if the girls weren't in hysterics, he would have asked for it, "Ron… was…"

The girls knew. He hadn't needed to tell them. Surely Hermione had seen Ron die, he didn't begrudge her the death, there was nothing she could do, but she had seen it. A bitter wave of psychological acid washed over him, did she really want to see the thestrals now? Or was she cursing their existence like everyone else that could see them, like everyone else that had seen someone close to them die; a painful reminder of everything they had lost. He was sure it was Marjorie that told Ginny, Hermione hadn't said a word, hadn't looked up from the purple woven carpet, hadn't opened her mouth but to scream a few times into her bruising hands. He could hear it the second she got to the office, at least ten minutes before him, "Oh Ginny! I'm so sorry… Ron's dead!"

"Killed?" Harry finished for him, was it right for his personal loss to overshadow the others? Ron was killed, four other people were killed… other people: Ron, what was the ratio of their suffering to his? Ginny let out a small moan of anguish, she was the only Weasley left in Hogwarts now. When Mrs. Weasley got here, his burden would be halved by Ginny's absence, her mother would wrap her in an embrace and they would hold each other so tightly their joints would pop and their breathing would be tight, he could see it – Mrs. Weasley's fierce protection of her youngest child. When she arrived, she and Dumbledore would begin discussing funeral arrangements and memorial services, "I will help you in any way I can" because the death of a child was never anticipated. There would be a multiple-party death celebration, the whole school, mothers, fathers, siblings, and reporters would gather in Hogwarts to witness their passing, remember them as they were, and hanging together etcetera etcetera. He could taste the meaningless supplications like bile rising towards his tongue.

The Muggle families would be stunned, amazed by the moving stair cases and sympathetic portraits, even the ghosts would be in attendance, this great joint-memorial that was bound to occur. Half of the wizards in Great Britain would be there, and a few scattered Muggles that desperately needed to understand why their children had to die for a war they did not yet understand. Hanging on the largest wall of the Great Hall would be personal tributes to each student that had died in the past year. Cedric, Cho, Roger, and Professor Trelawney would be shunted into a corner in light of this new tragedy. A young Hufflepuff couple, only fifteen years old both of them, a lone third-year Slytherin boy, the proprietor of Honey Dukes, and Ron had all fallen victim to the Death Eater's wand before anyone could think to draw theirs. It was a brutal reinforcement of Mad-Eye Moody's favorite dogma "CONSTANT VIGILANCE!"

* * *

Lupin was back. It was the first thing every student noticed in the Great Hall at dinner, a whisper rose from the high end of the Hufflepuff table, the table nearest the desolate werewolf's seat, and carried all the way through to Slytherin in a subtle crescendo that no one missed. He was devastation in a man, the very personification of an empty ruin; like a sunken shipwreck left to rot in salt water for centuries, the substance remained, but the structure and soul, the very being was gone with the tides. There had been four.

He was blank. Not an empty canvas, but one too covered in paint to read – mud. Mud, all of him mud, his hair turned the muddy brown of early onset graying, his eyes, once amber, were like silt. No one could meet them; everyone looked away from him eventually, this wasted carcass of a man, whose eyes hurt to see.

Lupin stared dejectedly into his meal, a human meal with human silverware, and humans all around him. Terrifying familiar humans, because he was a human, and it had taken him four months to draw himself back into a semblance of humanity – whatever that was. He looked up when someone spilled a goblet, not with a jerk of his head but the faint interest of someone deeply preoccupied, having to tear themselves away from the source of their concentration. He nodded once at Harry – Harry nodded back.

* * *

**Told you so.** Now please, if you hate me, if you love the angst and can't wait to find out what happens next, or if you want to tell me I'm a whore that's going to burn in hell for all eternity, the Review button is but a click away. 


	11. Ron

**Disclaimers: **I do not own Harry Potter – updates on this status pending my birthday, though the general assumption is I will continue not to own Harry Potter.

**Notes**: This chapter is going to be mostly existential angst. Do very subtle plotty things happen in this chapter? Well, yes yes they do, subtle plotty things will happen, we are furthering… well, y'all tell me what we're furthering But if you're looking for an action-packed chapter where 30 people die and the heroes shag like wild rabbits, I'm afraid this may disappoint. It's a bit pitiful as chapters go actually.

WOO HOO! **Lanfear1**, I will call the church and have you canonized for performing your third miracle, I promise ;D. In the mean time, yes – they do all seem to die. Funny trend that, I don't know what got into me. This story really just started out as a "Hmm. I want to kill Cho" endeavor and… developed. What's the show by the way? I'm always up for wasting away in front of my television.

**Neverbird**** – **Your reviews made me say "Aww, Nev" (I shorten everything, I apologize) aloud, and I very much confused the other people in the room. I'm sorry I made you sad! If it's any consolation, it took me two months just to put Ron's death scene (pitiful as it was) on paper. Draco, by the way, curses you for the hugs, but that's only because he's Draco and he doesn't know how to properly show appreciation. Unlike me :D, thanks for continuing to read, even if I made you cry.

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**Chapter 11:** Ron

"Avada Kedavra" Hermione stifled a shriek behind her hand as Ron fell through the beaded strings and almost into her lap. She rolled out of the way barely in time, and winced as his head hit the stone like a soggy pumpkin, the wet 'thunk' was eerie and lingering in her ears. She hadn't meant to, it was instinct, some rational part of her brain leapt out of the way knowing that the death eaters would be suspicious if Ron's body fell unnaturally – that had to be it, because she couldn't have avoided his falling corpse out of disgust. It didn't even look like Ron; it looked like a poor wax replica that didn't compare to the real thing, hollow somehow.

There was a trap door, he'd said so. Marjorie was crying, her fists balled into her mouth to smother any sound at the source, she wasn't moving, and was breathing in panicked bouts. There had to be a trap door around here, she scanned the walls, she could feel cold adrenaline flowing through her veins and she wanted to shiver, Ron had said there was one, she would be safe; Ron was mortally incapable of lying.

"I don't see him in here." Ron's body jerked, someone had kicked him. Hermione forced herself to tear her eyes away and scan the floor for it… trap door trap door….

"Well of course you don't you great oaf! He's not here!"

"The master was sure this would work." There, a flaw in the natural dust of the storage room, it flowed like ripples on a pond around a single tile… how? She had to lift it, she had to get Marjorie through the trap door, she had to, their lives depended on it. This was a logic problem, this was a puzzle, she could solve puzzles, it was her life's work, her specialty, her passion: but it wasn't a puzzle at all, it was simply an instinct that she didn't really have: she was a Muggle. She was a witch, Harry said so, Ron laughed at her for it, so many peaceful years ago. But that hadn't been a puzzle that was killing her – Marjorie whimpered.

Oh god, if they heard that, if they suspected the storage room of being anything but fizzing whizbees and peppermint imps they were both dead on the floor – if she could just levitate it a bit… "Wingardium Leviosa" she hardly whispered – her mouth moved but the sound remained trapped and unspoken as a reverent wish. It was a prayer and miraculously the tile moved. Shaking, she moved it to the side all the while ushering Marjorie through the small hole.

"Look again then, he's always with Weasley, who's that over there?" She pulled the tile over her head, surely they could hear it scrape against the stone, surely they could hear her pounding heart. Hermione had never been so frightened in her life; there was no logic in this. Two men had suddenly apparated into a candy shop and clinically killed everyone within sight, probably beginning from the blind corners to the back wall – if Ron hadn't pushed her through the curtain… she shuddered.

"He's not here!"

"Check the storage room then!" Hermione grabbed Marjorie by the wrist and ran, she ran harder than she had in her entire life, dragging her heavily-pregnant friend behind her. There was lemon-rind brittle digging into her hand and her shoes were suddenly impossibly impractical. Behind her she heard "Where the hell is Potter!"

Tears were streaming down her face by the time she ran into the wall under the humpbacked witch, the light from the tunnel opening burned her eyes, they'd left Ron behind. Ron loved her. They'd left Ron behind. He saved their lives. Why? Why did everything have to begin and end with Harry? Why did it have to be Ron? Hermione collapsed into tears, six feet below the small portal in the safety of Hogwarts as an overwhelming tidal wave of grief crashed over her. Ron…Ron…Ron….

Hermione curled into a ball on her bed, crimson sheets turned a bloodier shade with her tears – she'd woken up during the flight down the tunnel, but it didn't matter because she could finish the rest of the dream herself. Professor Snape fished them out of the tunnel and sent them straight to the headmaster's office, where frantic a meeting with McGonagall was being conducted – if the Death Eaters attacked Hogsmeade so brazenly, who was next?

* * *

This was not a trophy.

This was a tribute, this was homage to those gone before, gone but not forgotten – in theory if not practice. The school was silent. The quiet murmurs of sympathetic students had died down into the typical roar of who was dating whom and precisely how hard the N.E.W.Ts potions essay was. Harder than Care of Magical Creatures and easier than fighting a troll, was the general consensus – Harry had fought a troll; he suspected that the potions essay would be much more difficult. Heartbreak was soon dismissed amongst the young, vendettas were as easily forgotten as forged, and life as people knew it carried on in ways that were forever altered but never recognized. The light filtered through dust tinted windows, the world was yellow and spotted with infinitesimal particles of life floating through the air to settle on the cabinets and everything in them. Though the sun was beginning to set, it was still bright in here, the light spread like a virus, it touched everything – even him.

Harry stood still in the dying light, it was beautiful but it had no effect on him except to make him more apathetic to the world. The trophy room, reserved for medals of honor and endless records of academic achievement, was now and always to be a place of remembrance. Remember this award son? I got it when I was just your age for getting twelve Outstanding O.W.Ls. Remember this? For honor and valor, I saved the entire school from a horrible beast and kicked the half-giant out. Remember me, your best friend, I was murdered recently, you might recall?

Every glinting piece of metal begged recognition, every carefully carved plaque and every embossed picture frame screamed out to be noticed, please, this was me, my greatest achievement, my start in the world, please see me, remember me. They were all dominated, overshadowed by the large and impressive display against the back wall. The showcase that immediately drew the attention of the passer-by, the gruesome exhibit that reminded one and all to remain solemn as they swore to on the day it was erected. It was not a trophy, dieing was not an honor, dieing wasn't the next great adventure; it was just… ending, this graceful solution to the society's selective Alzheimer's was simply a tribute to the end. And the people in it had.

A younger Ron smiled sheepishly at him and waved from one of Colin Creevy's captured moments; he was happily on his own, happily not a party of the Weasley Family. There was a water spot in the lower right-hand corner of the photo; it had to be wrenched from Molly Weasley's brittle grasp. Harry supposed he finally got his wish, Ron stood alone against his family, when his surname was mentioned, it was Ron they thought of – for today. The rest of the pictures featured in the display did not matter. Friends and family members were permitted to write small notes to and about the deceased, Harry hadn't glanced twice at it, nor had he written a word – Harry didn't want to know. Percy Weasley rejoined his family in sorrow, Ginny cried into his shoulder instead of Harry's.

Harry finally understood, it would appear, Colin's obsession with photo taking, he wanted to remember everything, he wanted to have the excitement, the glow of a simple moment caught on film for everyone to see. Colin had stopped developing his photographs the wizarding way in his third year. It diluted the quality of the picture, he said, and Harry knew that he wasn't talking about the film. This place was like a cathedral, glorious and sanctified in memoriam to those that were somehow better than the rest – though a trophy of his sat shelved on the North wall, he felt out of place. He felt empty and soiled by comparison.

Harry could hear the dull roar of student activity from across the school; casual chatting that emerged as a deep a-melodic hum. The melancholy silence of the room was disturbed by nothing, there was no sound out of the ordinary to disturb his unrest, but it was interrupted nonetheless. There was a presence in the room that was other than his own, other than a picture, other than the room, with which he was too terribly familiar, having skipped meals three days in a row to stand here in dry mourning. It was dinner time in the Great Hall, and no footsteps echoed behind him, probably a ghost to usher him to the Hall with frozen and empty gestures. There was always one – he was preparing his speech "Yes sir, I'll be to dinner in a moment, I just had to pay my respects" but it was not a ghost he saw when he turned from the memorial.

Watching a person that you don't have the energy to hate can be an unnerving experience. For Harry Potter, it was a disconcerting one, unlike nearly every encounter in the past, he simply did not have any motivation to hate or even dislike Malfoy, nor was Malfoy projecting any reason to do so; he was simply walking steadily towards Harry and the memorial. If he could muster the energy to breathe, surely he would be insulted, surely he would be indignant 'stay away from me Malfoy' let me at least pretend that something was normal. He heard the faint tinkle of a shattering plate from the Hall. Maybe the Slytherin girl that was killed was a friend of Malfoy's, maybe he was here for the same reason Harry was, maybe he was here just because he had nowhere better to be and maybe appearing to react to the stimulus was giving him the illusion of reacting at all—or maybe Harry was projecting his insecurities onto Malfoy, who was not looking to the memorial at all.

Malfoy stopped three feet away from Harry, staring absently at what seemed to be every thing in the room; Harry acknowledged him with a curt nod. He could feel Ron bristling behind him, could feel the part of him that was Ron desperate to act – they had grown up together, they had shared everything, surely there was a large part of him that was simply indiscernible from a large part of Ronald Weasley. Surely he had died too. Students would be through with their meals soon – Hermione wasn't talking to him, the boy's dorm had been alarmingly mute lately, but Harry hadn't been speaking much either. "I hear you killed another one." Malfoy said.

CRACK!

His fist throbbed pleasantly while the anger flared away, he had broken open a knuckle on the contours of Malfoy's face, he could feel it seeping blood, and the pain was real in a way that nothing else seemed to be. Malfoy was sprawled on the floor with both eyes closed and his mouth open.

* * *

Told you it would be boring. This is the part where I beg you to be merciful despite this terribly boring, dull, waste of a chapter, and say "REVIEW!" 


	12. Detained

**Disclaimers: **I don't own Harry Potter. Trust me on this one, I lay no claim whatsoever to Harry Potter or its affiliates. I realize that fanfiction writers on a whole have to be somewhat touched by insanity, I mean, we write fanfiction for Christ's sake, but I can assure you: I am not deluded enough to think that I own Harry Potter. I do not own Harry Potter. …but my birthday's coming up ;D.

**Author's Notes: You may have noticed that the Title Changed!** Erm, yeah, I realize that was a dorky thing to do twelve chapters into a story, but I figured 'what the hell, no one gets what Twasits is anyway'. Twasits, if you haven't figured it out, is an acronym for 'there was a ship in the sky' which was the first half of the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter. You know, the bit before the first comma :laughs:. When I initially started writing this story I saved it as an MSWord file and that's just how it saved. I've always been shit at titles, and that one stuck (you should have seen me trying to figure out what to put as a summary… very amusing if you like antics and head-on-table-banging). I just changed it back because I decided that… well, not only is Twasits hopefully inelegant, I mean, Twasits, really. but it actually sort of fits in a … really weird way. And so, we move on to the fun part (me telling you how much I love you for reading) before chapter 12.

**Neverbird: **I'm not sure whether to be really happy and dancing around my kitchen (because "Neverbird reviewed me, Neverbird reviewed me", this happens frequently) or sort of embarrassed. It DOES take a Looooong time for Harry/Draco interaction in this story and my sense of romantic timing is non-existent let me assure you. But I'm still glad you're enjoying it – I particularly liked the bit about the lemon-rind brittle.

**Mooseonmars: **I haven't heard from you in a while! I'm happy you decided to stick with it too:grins: You don't think it's too slow? I'm always nervous about that… my own mother called it tedious.

**Alylizzie: **I have that problem too occasionally, see something you think will be really good and then three chapters in you're drooling and wanting to know when it will be over. I'm definitely glad you're not bored. Oh, but let me know if you DO get bored so that maybe I can fix it okay?

On with the show.

* * *

**Chapter 12:** Detained

There was a nightly routine. During her bath she scrubbed off the dead skin that had accumulated on her body with a liquid exfoliating soap, paying careful attention to her knees, elbows, and feet with a pumice stone. Her shampoo was designer, and her conditioner brewed to match with a heavenly lavender mint aroma. She washed her face with Madame Diluvia's purifying scrub, followed by a hydrating mask meant to clear her pores and refresh her skin. Wrapped in a towel she applied Madame Diluvia's eye crème, specifically formulated for girls her age to prevent aging lines ten years down the line, a spray toner to keep her skin fresh through the night, and a moisturizer for glorious skin in the morning and all day long. Though she expected no less for the price she paid for the luxury products.

Pansy always wore socks to bed, after applying oils and lotion to her entire body, paying particular attention to her feet, which were prone to becoming rough at the heel; she slid into bed for much deserved rest with a careful eye mask to help her relax. Every Friday night she deep-conditioned her hair, and treated herself to a manicure – they were too much work to do every night.

Much about her life was routine, she liked it that way, she liked knowing what came next, she hated surprises. There were twelve girls clamoring to use the prefect's bathroom at any given time, and while she sympathized with their needs, none of them were permitted to interrupt her routine. The bath was pool-sized, there were 8 stalls, and 8 additional girls' restrooms scattered across the school including house bathrooms – if the entire school suddenly felt the need to use the facilities Hogwarts could happily accommodate them. No individual was worth disturbing her peace over.

She worked hard for her good grades and her perfect skin, worked hard to maintain the appearance she'd fought for 5 years to achieve. She was by far the loveliest girl in the school, graceful, delicate, and intelligent – anyone would be envious of her and she knew this. Though Pansy was happily promised to wed the first born son of a prominent Death Eater family, she continued to work for her recognition. It would be a simple thing to cease all social activity in light of her engagement, but she would be banishing herself to permanent social estrangement – something she was not willing to accept for anyone.

Gently stroking the incredibly soft skin of her left forearm, Pansy lay nearly-asleep thinking. Draco had been acting so very strange lately. As the tacit head of Slytherin he had a responsibility to consistency, had a responsibility to his house—but his recent behavior had been something other than predictable. He was obsessed, but no one knew with what, he could often be seen staring into the distance, deep in thought, and interrupting him came with the mixed results of violence and indifference.

Blaise had been much the same way of course – his father had informed him at the beginning of their fifth year that he was to be married to 'the Parkinson girl,' and he hadn't quite known how to react. Pansy had always known what her role would be, the clever and unassuming wife of a prominent death eater, when she was told it was Zabini she was unsurprised and not at all disappointed. It was life, a fact and her only reality. Draco, however, had been raised to privilege and self-indulgence—he had more than likely expected to make his own choices in life and been told he would be used as a diplomatic sacrifice instead. Pansy was imagining his assumed fiancé, she was probably tall, darkly colored hair with skin as white as parchment, and utterly foreign. All Malfoy's spoke French fluently, it was a skill that came as a necessity when they were married off to the wealthiest pure-blood families from across the channel.

Pansy wondered how his mother's death would affect his marriage, and how his father's imprisonment would stand against the loyalties of his match. She was happy to have Blaise, who was as attentive and accepting as she – Draco's reluctance was amusing. Didn't he know that this was his life, the wondrous path his parents had set before him in hopes for the future? Didn't he realize his destiny?

* * *

Detention was becoming mundane. Having forced these students to clean nearly every available surface in Hogwarts, the heads of Gryffindor and Slytherin (respectively) had both run out of chores for Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy to perform, because nothing seemed to deter them from butting heads at every encounter. So it was after significant deliberation that the heads of house had simply confiscated their wands and locked them in the same disused classroom to wait out their detentions – if they chose to kill each other it would be on their own heads.

There was neither an inkpot nor quill to be found in the room, though if there were Harry didn't know what he would write. Though, simply being able to doodle was the best way to avoid the certain confrontation with Malfoy, who couldn't stay still to save his life—Harry knew this because he'd tested it by threatening to strangle him if he didn't sit. He was pacing like a caged animal, sitting for a total of five seconds before springing to his feet to once again stomp out his frustrations in a steady tapping of his highly polished shoes against the dusty floor. If Harry had the choice, he would petrify him, but as he didn't, settled for watching him make his way from the door to the wall fifty-four, fifty-five, fifty-six times.

"Malfoy!" He tried finally, sick to death of the almost frantic path he was wearing into the floor, "would it kill you to sit for a bit?"

"Quite possibly," was the glib response, though Malfoy sat anyway, on a bench not across the room, but far enough for their mutual comfort, "which I daresay is the reason you're so eager for me to sit here rotting."

"It wouldn't hurt." He said dryly. One less thing to worry about and one more soul to worry on his conscience until he died and those souls consumed him. He wondered if Malfoy ever thought about it: life, death, the afterlife, what would happen when politics no longer mattered, and if dying for a cause was really worth dying for. Probably not. As a point in his favor, Malfoy never struck him as particularly vapid, but he certainly didn't seem the type to think – Harry couldn't get inside his head, or anybody else's for that matter. He had enough thoughts of his own, seeing someone else's would send him to St. Mungo's ward for the psychologically impaired. Would Neville stop by to say hello to him when he visited his parents? Did Malfoy have a past at all? Harry had decided his future.

Sitting in silence, Malfoy was far more boring, and by natural inclination, far more infuriating than he had been while pacing. Harry supposed this was because he was tapping his foot with nervous energy, or because there was no other sign of life from him. Malfoy looked like stone to him, and it was all the more irritating because he had nothing else to look at. So Harry found himself staring at the back of Malfoy's neck while he felt Malfoy staring at his scar and there was nothing to be done for it because it would be hypocritical to demand he stop. Was that part of his body so interesting? Was it so fascinating in its glorified standing that everyone he came across felt the need to stare at it for hours on end? Until he'd learned the significance of it, he thought it was rather cool, the only thing about himself that he liked – now he liked his eyes, and his nose, and his hair which were distinctly his parent's. He could contentedly live the rest of his life without that stupid scar.

Harry needed something to change. His head hurt all the time, not necessarily his scar, but not necessarily not his scar. Occasionally he felt an angry twist between his eyes, which he'd come to interpret as anger and frustration from Voldemort – it was as though the light of day served to make him angry, noon came and went and his frustration mounted until Harry was going to bed with blinding headaches once a week. He ignored it, acted normally, acted like everything in the world was the same it always had been, and acted like nothing was the same because he had never once been normal. Harry had gone to the strict effort not to worry anyone, the careful precautions that would ensure the non-involvement that he specifically desired but still, something had gone entirely wrong – this time without his help.

Now he was thoroughly lost, Hermione wasn't speaking to him, Ron wasn't around to speak to. What was he supposed to do? There was nothing to be solved, no glaring inconsistencies, this time there was nothing stolen from a vault, no trail to follow, for once he wasn't cast into a situation that was determined to involve him – he had to make the conscious choice. And once he had, how was he supposed to do anything about it? Wasn't it incentive enough to avenge his friends' death? To avenge Cedric, Sirius, Cho, Ron? Wasn't Ron enough, weren't any of them? The list was building against him and the whole world expected him to do or say something that would make everything better. Malfoy looked like he was choking on something – Harry didn't know whether to be vindicated or concerned. "My best friend is dead." Harry tried blankly, for once the silence had been empty, and for once he felt inclined to fill it. "And I don't think I care."

Malfoy blinked and his gaze dropped the inch to meet Harry's eyes, Harry flushed prepared to defend his impulse; though he didn't know exactly how yet. There was a certain understanding in Malfoy's stare, and that's what it was, the Slytherin wasn't even looking at him in the sense that people could look at other people – he was simply staring. "My black eye seems evidence to the contrary." And for some reason, Harry smiled absently.

Their conversation in the hallway came back to him, a long string of insults and mockery disguised as a sincere conversation – more ammunition for their war against each other that neither seemed to care about this year. Dumbledore had called Harry into his office yesterday afternoon, "is there anything I can do for you Harry, is there anything you need? We've arranged for counseling for students that feel they need it…" he let the sentence hang and Harry didn't say a word one way or the other. Seamus had glared at him from across Ron's empty bed last night, Neville hadn't looked at him in days. "What would you do?"

"Fantastic question." Said Malfoy, he had held this conversation in his head thousands of times, though why he couldn't fathom – it was a waste of time and energy to prepare for something he knew he would never come to pass. He supposed it was like being anorexic but unable to stop yourself from rifling through the cupboards. A survival instinct that took precedent over everything else in life. Every time he opened his mouth to speak, however, the words came out wrong and he commonly ended up unconscious. "My mother killed herself."

"I didn't know that." Harry didn't feel guilty, just curious. He felt a bit as if he were standing on a magic carpet, feeling waves of air under his feet and knowing he wouldn't fall but unaware of his destination. Malfoy hadn't said a word about it, hadn't bragged about his family all term, or mentioned his vendetta; Harry found himself wondering just how self absorbed he'd been. "I'm sorry." He said, and winced, with acid in his mouth.

"What the hell for Potter?"

Harry very sincerely wished that he could say he was sorry for Malfoy's loss, he wished he could give his deepest sympathies, but Narcissa Malfoy was an elitist snob that would sooner see him dead than anything, and the only thing he was sorry for was having said so. It was a gag reflex, "Absolutely nothing. You'll get used to it eventually." And somehow he was on equal footing again.

The windowless room was stifling, there was nothing to see, and nothing to do. It would have been less painful to slam his head on the desk again and again until he was unconscious or dead, easier than facing hours of empty silence with someone he didn't care to know. Then there was Malfoy. The room may as well have been black, at least that way he could catch up on his sleep. If Malfoy chose to kill him, there was nothing he could do about it, and that would be the easiest of all. "I would hide for a week."

"What?"

"You asked me what I would do."

"You'd hide for a week? No revenge, you wouldn't say anything, you'd just… hide?"

"That's what you're doing isn't it?"

Harry didn't answer, he didn't know what he was doing any better than the next person, "Why did she kill herself?" Malfoy frowned contemplatively, and Harry awarded himself a hit point.

"I'm not entirely sure really. I suppose she just got tired of being around. Why, are you considering it?"

"Who wouldn't be tired of you?" It was insensitive, it was cruel, and it was the best thing that had come out of his mouth in months – Merlin knew that if this were to persist any longer than four hours he would off himself too. Wouldn't that make a fascinating front-page for Hermione to ruminate over "Dumbledore Kills Hero – Harry Potter Dead Serving Detention" and wouldn't the whole world just go to town in the tabloids. Maybe he really was considering offing himself. Sure the whole world might come to an end, prophecies unfulfilled and all the nonsense that doomsayer's like Trelawney spouted before they themselves kicked the bucket, but what a way to avoid confrontation. He would officially be labeled a passive aggressive war casualty.

"Ha ha. Very funny Potter, and I suppose you're just itching to gloat. Tough luck Malfoy, welcome to the club." He rolled his eyes as he mocked himself and Harry shrugged. He had no intention of gloating; it didn't seem the thing to do. Harry was willing to admit to the fact that he was a jerk, he would even go so far as to call himself a self-centered, insensitive, bastard, but he would never sink to Malfoy's level and tease someone about their deceased parents; not out of a sense of moral obligation to his own, the act simply seemed tacky. And that was sad in ways he couldn't begin to define.

The end, the end, it was the end, and the beginning of something entirely new because he hadn't managed to die yet. Harry wanted to believe that there was, but the fact was there was no such thing as purgatory on earth – time marched on, flew away and fulfilled all of its own clichés. The world spun whether he was ready to spin with it or not. Had Ron felt this isolated when Harry slid through hours of conversation, did he feel as cut-off as Harry did right now, when the world had slowed to a comfortable crawl and he was simply facing the hours? Harry longed for one of the split seconds of thought where he dashed through hours, but Malfoy wasn't letting him slide away.

"What's it like to be on the good side?" Clearly an academic pursuit—good and bad were subjective to meaning – Dumbledore's forces, the fortunate, the virtuous, the liberal wave crashing against Muggle persecution?

Neither of them knew precisely what Malfoy intended, and neither bothered to clarify before Harry said "I'm not entirely sure." But I'd rather hope it's not this.

"Potter?" Drawn again from his silent reverie, drawn again from slipping from realty into the cushiony down of "if" – Harry was reminded of why he hated Malfoy, but blinked his response 'what, spit it out. I don't have all day!' Just all century. Malfoy looked as though he'd swallowed a toad whole. "I…" Harry could see the toad being wretched out up the esophagus, Malfoy was gagging on it. "I've…" and he swallowed. "Are you out for vengeance?"

Harry's head hit the table with a dull thud. The burning question that seemed the first on everyone's mind, the question he was least able to answer. Ask him anything, ask him to say the periodic table of elements backwards, ask him how old to the day the prime minister was, ask him to put a sauce pan on his head and dance the jig Seamus taught him at the Quidditch world cup and he would do it. Botched, mangled, skewed, and clumsily, but he would do it. Ask him what he intended to do, however, and it was a question he sincerely did not know the answer to. "I suppose I sort of have to don't I?"

"I'm pleased to note you two haven't killed each other," Said Professor Snape from the door. Finally he could get out of here.

* * *

His shoulder burned. As he pushed himself to his knees, he could feel raw skin against the tattered fabric of his sweater, and knew that he was bleeding, if only from a scratch. Edward Bonvrer shivered; there was no wind, the only sound the soft sobbing of his girlfriend somewhere over the horizon of identical black masks, but he was frozen to the bone. He was meant to beg, beg for mercy and compassion from the cruel and faceless sea of dark robes and pointed wands.

He was meant to plead his case against an iron jury – and he did. His crime had been severe, the one truly unforgivable act committed by a death eater. He had joined with hopes of becoming something magnificent, and had turned into nothing more than just a name. He was a body in a mass of bodies, one of the many mindless units meant to intimidate, serving no purpose but to be present—Edward knew he didn't matter in the larger scheme of things. He knew it didn't matter whether he lived or died in the war to come, and he knew his story would be forgotten just like everyone else's, but he needed to be a part of the revolution, to better his self through contribution to the cause. Freedom, and equality, for all wizards, everywhere. He would no longer have to conceal himself in Muggle clothing and skirt the shadows of wizardom to survive.

Edward wanted to be free, to fight for his rights to walk any street, openly discuss any subject with any person, wizard or Muggle, and he held onto the dream long after the reality had set in. He had entered this revolutionary group with ideals and good intentions, had suffered the trial of pain to join this fraternity, forever marked, but had never risen to the upper echelons as so many others had; still the young and fervent man he had been twenty years ago.

So his crime had been one of that same vision. In the deluded passion of an eighteen year old boy, he had fallen in love with, or at least made love to, a Muggle girl; she could hardly be called a woman, though he was a man of nearly forty. His one truly heinous act, the first and last offense in the Death Eater's dogma – kill if you must, rise by stepping on your rival's corpses if you must, but never associate with a Muggle, for they are vermin, dogs not worthy of our great presence. News traveled quickly amongst the power hungry minions, and a man once overlooked as primarily useless had become the fast center of attention.

His master had chosen his punishment well. The girl he'd cared enough for to break the rules, though he was unaware of their consequences, was tortured before his eyes. She wasn't worth murdering, she wasn't worth wasting the energy to give her the sweet release of death, and her spell-muffled screams pained him as much as the bruising concrete beneath his knees as he was held fast. The biting frost of early March slid through his clothing and into his heart as his former comrades formed an airtight circle around him. He was meant to beg, he was meant to struggle against their judgment as each faceless member cursed or hexed them as they saw fit, forbidden only from using the killing curse. It was the perfect opportunity to test out that new spell Mortimer had read up on, it was the perfect opportunity for Viktor to practice his aim with severing spells. Edward would die tonight and he knew it.

A stabbing pain at the nerve center in his back, he suffered a violent coughing fit and spat up a piece of his cheek, the baby toe of his right foot was gone, he screamed long and loud as a hot mass of magic twisted inside his stomach—he lost his bowels. Round and round the circle went, until he could no longer beg, until pleas of "Master, forgive me! Please master save me!" were reduced to the dying rattles of dead leaves in his throat, and he could no more than twitch with each new introduction to agony.

He could feel the pulse in his fingertips, experiencing sharp new pain with every heart beat that reached his mutilated nail beds. One two, one two, one two, one…two…. One…two…one…two….One… until having slowed to a gentle stop despite his injuries, Edward Bonvrer shuddered and slid helplessly into the white light of his failed ideals.

In the morning, a groggy tourist intending to see the famous Mason Square before it was flooded with people would stumble upon the gruesome scene; John Doe maimed and mutilated, Jane Doe frozen to death twenty feet away, her eyes still open with some maniac light. More on the assumed couple, the woman, whose name has still not been released by the authorities, was four weeks pregnant, there is no record of the man found at the scene, and the investigation of the London Police has as of yet yielded no results. If you have any information on the identities of these pour souls, or information about the perpetrator of this vicious crime, please contact the authorities immediately.

* * *

End! Right… :coughscoughs: Pansy… uh huh. I was tapped for influence, I'm sorry. I promise she won't make a reappearance and you are more than welcome to laugh at me. Honestly, realizing his destiny :Snerk:. Rather happy about Edward though – that section turned out well. Leah wondered if I was planning on genocide by the end of the story. I'm FAIRLY certain he's the last person that dies for a while… I think. Shekeeps accusing me of hurting people's feelings because I'm killing off all the best people. It's probably true. REVIEW! (but only because I'm begging). 


	13. Questions

**Disclaimers: **I don't own Harry Potter. Don't make me say it again – every time I do, part of me dies.

**Notes: **WHEE! I ROCK! You don't know why? Well that's a shame, allow me to enlighten you – it's my birthday! That's right baby, November 21st, people should love and adore me now (at least for the afternoon.) Some people already DO love me, like my mum. Other people are just very VERY kind and draw me FANART! Yahoo! Okay, so the other day I got an email and in it was a link to my very own Twasits fanart by **Chelsea.** Beautiful beautiful day, I was so excited I burst into tears and spent the evening dancing around my dining room. The people that love me did not appreciate that. The picture is on my website, go look at it there.

Right then, onward ho.

**Alylizzy: **Hehe, I'm glad you don't think it detracts from the story, I was worried about that. In any case, you should like this chapter. I am all about Luna myself – she's so fascinating.

**Neverbird: **Your kindness never ceases to astound me. Well, actually I read your review and started wailing because you delivered such a perfect statement about Harry and Draco's future relationship that I freaked out, screaming at the top of my lungs "NOW IT HAS TO BE GOOOD! NOOOOOO!" several times over. I think I quite scared the dog. ':laughs:' But – once I calmed down a bit (two cups of tea and Leah telling me to shut the hell up) your review inspired me. Damn straight! It will be dynamite. :D. Thank you.

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**CHAPTER 13: **Questions

The deegles were on the move. It was a little thing, but it spoke of big things to Luna, who'd been keeping an eye on tiny developments for as long as she could remember. When she was only five years old, she remembered lying on the floor with her father, her little blue eyes just big enough to watch the dust bunnies form under the couch. Each bunny was like a civilization unto itself, each particle a person and each little dusty wave a clique, a band, a house, a family unto itself. Civilizations crumbled apart and reformed, they grouped together, and they danced around each other as they marked out their territories under the couch.

When her father sneezed they scattered to the four winds then tentatively made their way towards each other yet again, the nature of gravity and static cling until Hurricane Daddy blew through again. They spent hours together, her little feet playing with the knees of her father's trousers as they spent hours on the hard wood watching the dust – until her mother swept them up and scowled at the delinquent pair before swatting both their rear ends with the broom. Luna was seven when her mother died in a charms accident. She never called it that of course, because adding realism to the problem that took her mother made it that much more painful.

Her father had once been a reputable journalist, he could have been editor of the Daily Prophet, and would have done a better job of it too. But her mother had always kept him a bit together, and if he wanted to go off after she died then Luna was in no position to stop him. They had to learn to cope in their own way, she had hers, her father had his. Traveling the world, and reporting on obscure creatures that no one else believed in, she had seen it all. Losing himself in his work made him feel better, losing herself in her head made everyone a little more comfortable than letting everything she felt she'd lost hang out.

So she'd kept her head down, and kept her mouth shut. Eventually she learned to listen, because that's all she could do. Listen, to everything, with her eyes, her ears, her nose, with every sense she had listened to the wind, so she didn't flinch when things broke, and she didn't wince when people called her "Loony Lovegood" and she might have heard things differently through turnip earrings, but they were real. The deegles were moving, they were running, and it meant big things for all sorts of people.

* * *

The note read "Astronomy tower, midnight." He'd slipped it to Potter in the library as he passed with a potions text that rivaled the Encyclopedia Britannica M-O in size, though he didn't need it. He wasn't interested in the text; there was a more complete edition in his home library, one that hadn't been stripped of relevant information. Relevant to what he didn't know, but if it wasn't there, it was surely relevant to something of value. No, he hadn't needed the text, but he needed to be in the library, because Potter was in the library.

Draco Malfoy had never been particularly proficient at concealing his intentions, but he found himself skulking around the school like a convicted felon, watching his friends as they watched him – for anything. He felt eyes on him at every waking moment, and quite a few moments when he wasn't. So he found himself wide awake against a stone wall in the highest tower of Hogwarts Castle, fighting the urge to pace with every muscle in his body, which in some ways was more exhausting, but he wouldn't give in. He wouldn't show anybody in the world that his mind was racing and his heart was pounding like he'd run from Marathon to the Greek army and back. He wouldn't let his body run circles around this infuriating room, no matter what his brain was doing.

His mother had been right, in the sense that only a mother can be right: his mother had been right about everything leaving neither loopholes nor questions to be desired, it was the most hateful thing she had ever done. He couldn't rely on his name, wealth, or anything else he'd grown up to believe would be eternal, all he had was himself and a handful of half formed ideas. He would never be a Muggle sympathizer, he wanted nothing to do with them, he wanted Muggles gone from his life, but he had come to see their necessity. It was purely mathematical, pure logic.

Voldemort viewed Muggles as a lower life form, it was a simple act of mercy to kill them, put them out of the agony that must surely be magic-envy; just like it was a simple act of mercy to drown infants to save them the humiliation of foster homes, orphanages, parents that didn't want them. By eliminating Muggles, Voldemort would reduce the world population by over half because of a silly vendetta against his Muggle father.

A man (if he could still be called a man) that powerful would be the undisputed world controller, the potential for micromanagement was dizzying. His fear of half-bloods would generate strict breeding laws, no inter-racial procreation, and absolutely no tainted blood, so the breeding populous would be cut down to five pureblood families per major European country. Within seven generations, the entire wizard population would be Weasleys, and the eighth would be ruthlessly in-bred, a world of drooling imbeciles ruled over by an immortal dictator.

It was disgustingly possible; Voldemort would be using the noble sons of pureblood families to bring on their own unwitting demise, and with a sudden click, Draco could see the whole paranoid scenario before him. He was no Muggle sympathizer, but he would not see his children's children, the descendants of the Malfoy line, reduced to nothing more than drooling worshipers of a false god. In a sense it was already begun, by his father's plan Draco was to remain a teenager forever, until his mother opened his eyes in the only way she knew how.

But he was doomed, by his own actions and those of his father; he would be destined to follow the path set before him. Perhaps he would find Muggle post-it notes left by his mother along the way, how to cope when you've realized you chose incorrectly – Draco darling, the scotch is in a compartment under the fifth guest bed. But he would never allow anyone to see how panicked he was about the whole mad world, and he certainly would never let Potter see him squirm. If Potter ever showed up.

He showed no signs of doing so; it was surprising and irritating in the extreme, how very like Potter to show up every time he wanted to make an idiot of himself, and ignore him out of spite when he actually needed… help: though it galled him to admit it. Unbeknownst to him his foot was energetically rolling from side to side, inner ankle, outer ankle, inner ankle, outer ankle – he forced it to stop by curling his toes in the end of his shoes. It was a very tight fit, and pinched.

"Malfoy," an estranged voice said from across the room, nearly fifteen feet away, he estimated as Potter's ruffled head emerged from the confines of his invisibility cloak, followed by the rest of him. Draco had always thought it extremely convenient; he might have the worst luck with potions, he might be hopeless without Granger at charms, transfigurations, _and_ herbology, but the reluctant hero always got the greatest tools. "Why am I here at one in the morning?"

"Because you're late." Malfoy snapped, and let his foot start tapping, this time with impatience because everything else had flown out the window when Harry made his appearance. It always did, articulation, wand work, and his well reputed cold logic made the dooming leap from the astronomy tower and went 'splat' on the frozen ground below whenever Harry Potter was in the vicinity. The corner of his brain that realized this stood by and watched with something between disgust and grudging acceptance of this little flaw; and the part of his brain that didn't realize this made an ass of the part that did at every turn.

Harry bent his head to scratch his eyebrow and shrugged as if to say 'so? I had things to do' though what they were at midnight he couldn't imagine. "Malfoy, if I'm here so you can whine at me, could you write a letter and owl it so I can get some sleep?" Apparently Potter was itchy because he'd moved to his ear, then the back of his head as he yawned.

"No Potter, I…" his stare was absolutely the most presumptuous, condescending thing he had ever seen, his voice was flatter than an Irish skillet, "we need to talk."

"Oh good, I was hoping we would do something normal like climb trees, dance around the maypole, bludgeon each other to death with Quidditch gear… how's the eye by the way?"

Draco snorted, hadn't he once said something about sarcasm?1 Well, snide fit the remark as well, and he was never so disturbed in his life. He wanted to ask about twenty three thousand questions about it; Harry had been playing Quidditch like a shark, silently ripping victory out from under everyone he played, it was violent even, but impressive. He wanted to ask all about the glowering and stony silences with people that had once been friendly, but he hadn't successfully asked Harry Potter a question since he was ten years old in Diagon alley, looking for the scrawny kid's surname.

He wished he was ten again and admission of ignorance came as easily. "Potter…" It was hard to say anything but his surname now, it dragged a wry smirk out of him, and he was feeling less and less like he had three days ago when he'd first heard the latest Death Eater news. If he could just spit it out, if he could just pretend for five seconds that he was asking to borrow a galleon… well that would never work he'd never asked for money in his life. Gritting his teeth he swallowed his pride and everything that went with it, the bile that was churning in his stomach, the shudder that ran across his shoulders, the rigid indignation that was almost a substitute for confidence, and he was left with what he'd always had. Fear, and his self preservation instinct took over. "I need your help."

Harry blinked, opened his mouth, and blinked again while closing it. A hiss of air escaped his nose, he blinked more, hair fell into his eyes, Draco wished he would say something until he finally did. "Right. Clearly you've gone mad, good luck with that. I'm going to bed." More frozen blinking, did he never get tired of it?

Harry turned on his heel and took a step towards the door, whisking his cloak around his shoulders. Draco tried not to scowl and successfully failed. "Potter." Harry's head stopped and sunk on invisible shoulders. "I'm serious."

Draco had been stared down by many things in his long career of stubborn contests of will, but being stared at by a disembodied head, a head that was blatantly appraising him with flat green eyes was…somewhat horrible. How did he stack up, what was the criteria, what was he supposed to do during this furious inspection? He itched the spot above his ear. "So?"

"So?"

"With what you git?" Harry hadn't heard that word since before Ron died; it was strange how easily it slipped off his tongue. "Your homework, your chocolate frog card collection?"

Harry Potter was a bastard. A bastard to make him say it, and a bastard to make him forcefully admit his former allegiances, forget personal loss, forget his generous experience, or the genuine kindness he displayed to humanity, Harry Potter was the worst person that shouldn't be alive and Draco wasted no time in telling him so.

"So we know you haven't been brainwashed." Harry deadpanned as Malfoy wrapped up his vicious tirade against Harry's parentage, his upbringing, his sexual habits, and slue of other lowbrow insults that Harry wouldn't feel comfortable repeating in the Hogshead. Harry was almost impressed by Malfoy's astounding grasp of descriptive and vulgar language. Malfoy glared. "Why didn't you go to Dumbledore for this?"

"Oh, that would be brilliant, Potter. Call me selfish, but dying on the right side is still dying." Did he really need to tell Potter that Dumbledore couldn't protect anything? Draco kneaded his eyes, he could feel a headache building at his temples; wouldn't it be nice to forcibly smash his head on a rock in time to the pounding until he was too dead to care? Dumbledore couldn't protect him, and he didn't want protection, he didn't want a reassuring pat on the back and a mumbled "I'll take care of everything" before being punted out of that ridiculous office; he wanted a hand in his fate, he wanted to know every minute detail of every little plan, because it was his life – he wanted to survive it. Draco wanted a miracle; he wanted something that only someone who understood the frustration of being associated with Dumbledore could possibly know.

"So… how exactly am I supposed to help?"

Malfoy had forced himself to evaluate the situation. Panicked and improvised the excuse for not going to Dumbledore when the fact was he couldn't take the publicity, if his father found out about Draco's assumed change of heart, aurors or not Lucius would have his hide. He had even forced himself to stay in this spot and wait for Potter for an entire hour when running for the hills had never seemed like such a wonderful idea, but the one thing he hadn't considered was why. Why go to Potter when the simple thing would have been going to the aurors, why go to Potter when he could have asked Snape, why on earth hadn't he asked Snape? It seemed so stupid now, so absolutely ridiculous, his paranoid delusions, but he couldn't risk his potions master's dark associations. "If I knew that Potter, I wouldn't have to ask." He took a deep breath, that sentence had been fantastic; something like what he used to feel when his father clapped him on the shoulder, a poor excuse for a hug. Proud, defensible: like a Malfoy.

"Fine." Said Harry, and he suddenly looked just as tired he kept claiming to be. He looked dead as Malfoy's first pet goldfish; gaunt sunken cheeks, ash circles beneath his eyes, and a face that was not meant to be pale – Harry looked gothic in every sense of the word. Gothic, and angry, and tired. "When you figure it out, let me know." And the rest of him disappeared beneath the invisibility cloak.

* * *

Voldemort rapped idly on the exposed ribcage of a Muggle boy, click clickity, clickity click, click clickity, he was so bored. Or at the very least, extremely frustrated – his efforts were becoming fruitless, and mindlessly pursuing something that appeared not to exist was on the vast and varied list of what defined insanity. Not that he was insane, just a scientist searching out a cure – then, denial was also a form of insanity.

There was something obviously anatomically inferior about Muggles, inherently different for their lack of magical abilities, and therefore lacking in the vitally rumored core of magic – a core that was infuriatingly still a rumor. This boy clearly fit the Muggle definition of healthy, heart still pumping under the very spot that he was tapping, no missing piece, no vacant cavity wherein something roughly the size of a gherkin (at least that was the estimated proportion) was distinctly in absentia.

Muggles had no magical resistance, years at that loathsome Muggle institution had taught him that through sadistic experimentation. But was that to say that Muggles had no latent magic at all? Or was the core of magic simply a matter of the soul – was there a way to measure the soul? It was suspected, measured, even recorded that the body lost exactly 21 grams of weight at the exact moment of death, was the soul of a wizard any heavier for the core? That would be a difficult experiment to conduct, it would require at least four preparatory spells and 10 individuals (both wizard and Muggle) to kill. Vaguely he wondered if the soul theorem was true, would a very precisely tuned weight-maintaining spell keep the soul from leaving the body? Talk about revolutionary advancement in the medical field – not that wizards had problems with such things.

A warning bell rang in some corner of his examining room, yes yes, he knew – the longer the specimen was exposed, the less of a chance it had for life. The boy was going to die – not from some irreparable damage but simply because not disposing of his lab rats had caused him problems in the past. He could easily zip the boy up, hide the scar, wipe his memory, and little Timmy could be found down the well after 30 hours missing. But what would happen when Timmy got called out to play, and suddenly his chest split open and his ribs got crushed in the inevitable fall, and mom, who'd only recently gotten her darling boy back, would see his intestines splattered across the road? Besides, it was too much effort for one worthless Muggle boy.

If he were to dissect a living wizard like this, which didn't seem like a bad idea given the sheer incompetence of the majority of his cohorts, would he see the core? Of the many corpses he'd inspected, he hadn't seen a thing – but maybe the core was only prevalent in the living. Maybe if he could get a living wizard specimen on this table, he could find it, and if he could find it there was a good chance that he could utilize it. What if he could get Potter? Wouldn't it be poetic justice if he could use a piece of Potter's own soul? Why waste all that brilliant potential by murdering him when he could just as easily tweak his perceptions of the universe and put him to work?

Of course, that was assuming he could find the damned thing and experiment with it—his lofty ambitions would, for once, have to take a back seat to scientific research. It was a race to the end and a solution, if he didn't find the core first someone else would, protect against potential tampering, and that wasn't a risk he was willing to take. As it stood, there were over 100 death eaters, the best and brightest scientists and wizards he had on board researching a way to essentially overthrow a long-standing government. If Dumbledore's spies somehow discovered the efforts of those medical technicians he would no doubt be looking for a way to oppose soul-magic innovations.

Other minds were busily striking fear into the masses, and still more were running covert operations to secure funds for their noble aspirations – everything from drug schemes to cheaply produced cauldrons. What had once been the idle daydreams of a lonely, bitter young man had become a thriving organization quite unlike anything the world had seen before – if only for the fact that they would be successful. So it was with a burgeoning sense of pride that he watched the young heart beneath his hand make its final struggle against life.

* * *

**And we're done for now**! GOD Voldemort is SO much fun to write. Yes, I realize that's somewhat disturbing, but it's TRUE. He is honestly a BLAST to write, I'm fairly certain I had Nazi experimentation in mind when I wrote that segment.

1 Right, once again I fuck up. The sarcasm line was "Sarcasm doesn't suit you" from Habitual Bastards (also written by me) hehe. Watch me be distracted. Instead of just changing the line, of course I just whined about it. Alas, such is the story of my life.

**The begging: **Here it comes folks, that part you all dread where the poor and put upon writer of absurdly depressing fanfiction BEGS you to review for her. She cries, she pleads, she crawls on hands and knees to kiss at the hem of your robes and the dirty toes of your shoes for praise, and occasionally flames (I don't mind criticism, honestly). Well, I'm doing all of that. **PLEASE REVIEW! IT'S MY BIRTHDAY, PRETEND YOU CARE! **


	14. Giant Change

**Disclaimer: **Me no own. You no sue. Qui?

**Notes: **Alas, as a plot develops the story gets worse – somehow that's always been my problem. I wish there was a way for me to have good plots and a good story around it… maybe I should just kidnap a plot genius and hole them up in my basement, making them write plots and subplots on sticky notes until they die of exhaustion and I have a life-time supply of plotted sticky notes which I can use to make money money money. Urm, right.

**People I'm Thanking: **

**Neverbird: **Never change, seriously. I'm so glad you liked the bit about the weighing of the soul and all that – ah thank you Adolph Hitler for your never ending inspirations. The deegles will be making an appearance in this chapter actually, with any luck people will figure it out.

**MooseonMars: **Yes yes, I know it was short. This one's an extra 1000 words just for you (well, not really, it just worked out that way sorry…). Cheers!

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Chapter 14: Giant Change

Weetabix dribbled down Dumbldedore's beard leaving oat colored particles from his lip to his lilac robe. Harry chuckled at the obscenely contradictory image that he'd been seeing for the last five years, the most respected man alive in all of wizardom, and he had breakfast spilling down his front.

Were Dumbledore's duties as Headmaster as taxing as Harry's duties as a student? Was school taking a back burner like it seemed to for Harry? Hermione was no longer forcing him to do his homework, though she had actually taken the time to glance at him this morning. She opened her mouth as if to say something, and then turned away, it was a start at least. She and Marjorie had been leaning on each other like a pair of drunkards stumbling from a bar, picking each other up when necessary and trying to avoid pissing on each other's shoes. Was Dumbledore simply choosing to ignore his work at Hogwarts in lieu of the war effort, or was he somehow managing both without seeming to turn a hair out of place? Harry couldn't handle school, it was a struggle to get out of bed every morning, a struggle to peel his eyes open, but what else was he supposed to do? School was his entire life, get up, get going, keep learning, motivate yourself to absorb enough information to fulfill your purpose. Then, and only then you can fall apart.

If he could ever work up the energy to fall apart, because sleep wasn't coming easy to anyone, and he was so tired that if this thing ever ended he could sleep for the remainder of his life. Or maybe it was all in his head and he had successfully isolated himself from the world once again, his paranoia having caught up to him. Maybe everyone else was really snoring in their beds, maybe Hermione wasn't talking to him because he simply wasn't a person to talk to. It would be nice if the entire Gryffindor dorm joined him in his sleepless nights, lying on his back staring at his respective square of ceiling, or watching Neville's eyes start to droop over his transfiguration homework, or listening to Dean snore in the next bed over, over the gap that used to be filled by Ron's chainsaw hacking. Harry shoved his glasses up his nose with his middle finger and accidentally smudged them near the bar – damn. He was so bored with his own head.

There was a soft sort of fluttering overhead that you more felt than heard because everyone knows that owl's make no noise when they fly, and Harry reflexively bent over his breakfast, protecting it from the stray feathers that floated down with the mail. Nothing came to him, it didn't usually, as there was no one left to write him, but a copy of the Daily Prophet was dropped near Hermione's sausage, and Marjorie received her weekly horoscope scroll, over which she was pleased – her child would probably be a Taurus, it was fun to see how it might turn out. She'd said as much repeatedly, and though they still weren't speaking, or weren't speaking yet, Harry knew from Hermione that she was concerned – Marjorie was placing too much faith in ridiculous stereotyping laws laid down thousands of years ago. Harry didn't care.

What did Malfoy think he was doing? The question popped into his head and refused to leave, what was Malfoy trying to accomplish by doing this to him? As if he wasn't busy enough, well, he hadn't been doing anything so he supposed he really wasn't busy at all, so much as incredibly entropic. He could have easily gone to Snape with his little problem, which Harry supposed to him was a rather large problem but he couldn't care less, and Snape would have hopped to his feet making suggestions, calling in his debts, all to get one spoiled boy out of his predicament. But no, the stupid blighter had come to him begging the most ridiculous favor imaginable – save my life, but I'll fight you every inch of the way for it.

Harry managed to frown, roll his eyes and sigh all at the same time, and it was about all he'd done in a week. He got a near-daily lecture from Snape about not turning in his assignments, but it didn't matter because he'd be passed up to seventh year anyway. The Potions master was taking the opportunity to scowl furiously at the Ravenclaw table, they were ahead by 20 in his class, and Snape's house was Slytherin to the core. Over a seat was Professor Sprout and, to his great surprise, Lupin, though it shouldn't have been a surprise at all because somebody had to sit next to the sour old bastard. To his right was Dumbledore, whose hands were shaking, and Harry got no further in reviewing the breakfast seating chart. The headmaster had gone the color of Harry's oatmeal as his long nose peeked over the tip of a fluttering note, there was still Weetabix on his chin.

Seamus shot him a concerned look from across the table. Harry didn't see it, he was on the move already, running back to his room without bothering with the standard 'I forgot a book' excuse. No one cared what he was doing these days, and given the look on the headmaster's face, he would not be surprised if classes were canceled for an emergency meeting of the Order. Which Harry would be sneaking himself into in short order, at least until the old man called him on it, and listening in on any conversations pertaining to the obviously disturbing news Dumbledore had received.

Dumbledore's cat could have died, a tree limb could have fallen and crushed a relative's leg, but something about the pained expression and the sudden drop in color on Dumbledore's face made Harry wary of change in his own life. And this time he was going to find out what it was before he was called into that damned office to be summarily told about the people he was supposed to love.

The invisibility cloak smelled of the house in Surrey, it smelled like his trunk, and it smelled like it always used to; Dumbledore's office, a glass of water, a bit of sweat, and the inevitable panic that caused it. How often had he wondered at being seen? And for that matter, how often had people actually seen him? Most magic worked on the principal that 'if you believe it will work, it will work' and his invisibility cloak, as explained by Flitwick in fifth year charms, enabled people to wander where they were least likely to be seen. Invisibility cloaks, no matter how finely crafted were not infallible.

If you were specifically expected by a singular person of great power, he or she would be able to 'see you' or sense your presence no matter what cloaking devices were active. It was an entirely new avenue of business for espionage agents and spies who were sent to scout that very property, delivering the names of fellow spies to rich debutants that were wary of their alarm systems. The problem was expecting exactly the right person at exactly the right time, in a world full of names attached to a world full of such powerful devices, these methods rarely worked—perhaps the only saving grace of honor amongst thieves; if you weren't caught, you were never sold out.

It was a disturbing thought rather, all the places he'd been, and all the things he'd seen, knowing he shouldn't have – if anyone thought for an instant that he'd be there…. At the very least, most people were easily distracted and while Harry Potter was frequently the topic of discussion, he was rarely thought of to be trespassing onto those very conversations. There was an advantage to being the privileged 'golden boy Potter' if you didn't count the losses; at the rate they were piling up, he didn't bother estimating them in anymore.

Dumbledore seemed to float down the corridors, gathering to him the very arms of Hogwarts, sending painted neurons arching across synapses of space and time and into the living rooms of their counterparts. Within the hour he would have the most powerful forces both Ministry employed and quite the opposite, assembled in his office over tea. It was the best and safest form of communication in the world, because you couldn't trap and torture a painting like you could a person. Harry shook the thought off, and tried not to trip over a cobblestone.

Professor Snape came barreling down the hallway like the great bat Quirrel had labeled him nearly five years ago. Cloak flapping behind him like some vampire paradigm. Bloodsuckers United, this is the man we all admire, the very personification of our cause; regardless of whether he drinks blood, who knows what he gets up to in those dungeons of his, Thaddeus, could you please go on a scouting mission for the benefit of all? To better understand our god. Harry tried not to get caught in the back-draft of his cloak and carefully followed the man into Dumbledore's office, hobbling through in a half crouch just behind the tail of that whipping fabric.

Gadgets whirred and clicked on shelves that were stocked heavier than Honeydukes in late August. Snape was gesturing violently overhead, arms lifting and falling dramatically, though he hadn't actually managed to get a word past his wildly flapping lips. From his position crouched beneath the dead gaze of a suit of armor Harry watched Dumbledore sigh in the face of this unheard tirade. It must have been difficult to appear so omnipresent, or at the very least dramatic with soot in one's beard. There was a loud thud that shook the floor as the door banged open to admit Alastor Moody, who glowered across the room, eye rolling like a loose marble in its socket.

Harry jolted, if he were discovered here, the consequences… probably wouldn't be that serious. Surely he would get a furious lecture from Professor Snape, smug approval from Moody, and quite possibly a disappointed frown from Professor Dumbledore, which he'd gotten so many of lately they were no longer a valid form of punishment. Still, being caught out under a suit of armor would be awkward for the entire room, so he stayed as still as possible in his niche, and took some calming breaths, remarkably unnoticed by the esteemed personages in attendance.

"I have called to order, this meeting to discuss the news I received just this morning." Harry hated being right, more often than not, when he was it turned out all wrong for the entire world; he preferred being the village idiot, letting Hermione correct his every mistake. But he'd been wrong about so many things; his allowance must have run out. It couldn't have been, 'This opens the perfectly routine debriefing number seven hundred and thirty three of the Order of the Pheonix… Nothing to report, sadly, my poor cat Fifi has passed away." Harry had nothing against Fifi, imagined or not, but he preferred a cat-funeral to the inevitable bad-news they would be receiving today.

Minerva McGonagall emerged from a door Harry had never seen before, and went to stand behind the headmaster, peering through the room. Harry flinched before he realized that she was actually glaring at Mundungus Fletcher. "I'll be blunt ladies and gentlemen," She began once the muttering and coughing from every corner of the room had ceased, "I have some terrible news. It would appear…"

"It would appear that negotiations with the Giants have broken down," Dumbledore continued in her stead, thumbs locking themselves together over the table as he fought to maintain control of his voice. "While our operative was attempting to convince the Giant Council to support us in the coming war, the local politicos, who had formerly associated with Lord Voldemort, have usurped the throne."

There was an alarmed crescendo from the portraits on the walls that took the Order members a moment to echo, having had to translate that into Giant terms. Some thug had bludgeoned the current king and sided with the Death Eaters after the promise of unimaginable amounts of wealth, land, and power. They'd lost the Giants? The Giants, who were the only remaining non-Wizard organization of any size that could possibly help them in the war, were now an official adversary. A year ago it had been stupid to send Hagrid to the mountains, a long shot even then. Making him return, trying to win over the new giant leader – what had Dumbledore been thinking? Was this an attempt to verify his previous failure, or just a massive oversight on Dumbledore's part? It was hard to imagine the idiot that would send his most loyal follower to a certain death, but no part of Albus Dumbledore need be imagined – he was sitting three feet away.

Harry's brain ground to a halt, he was sure the entire room could hear the gravely squeal of his mental processes hitting the brakes. Not only had the Giants been apathetic to their cause, they sided with Voldemort. Hadn't Hagrid explained to them that if Voldemort won the war they would be slaughtered? Giants, centaurs, werewolves, merfolk, vampires, everything not-human would be used for manual labor, building an empire to honor the reigning conqueror until they dropped dead of exhaustion. Harry could see a picture from his primary school history text burning behind his eyes; "Arbeit Macht Frei" Work will set you free.

"Our last contact from Hagrid, was over three weeks ago. The chain of informants has reported that they have not received word from our operative since. He is presumed dead." Dumbledore delivered this final ultimatum with solemn candor, the final blow against an already punch-drunk audience. Mundungus Fletcher looked sober for once, McGonagall was crying into her hand, all around the room faces reacted violently to the news, Hagrid had been a friend to all and one of the best ever to have graced the doors of Hogwarts. A sentiment that would later be expressed at his memorial service.

Harry didn't wait to see what else would be said, he didn't want to listen to endless debates on 'what to do' when there was nothing to be done, he didn't want to suffer the mind-numbing mutual sorrow, and he certainly didn't want to hear Dumbledore make yet another speech at how it would all turn out right in the end. He'd most certainly had enough of that, or at least enough to know that he couldn't stomach it again. Presumed dead could mean a number of things, but in Hagrid's case, Hagrid who had never concealed anything in his god-given life, it was a sure bet. He was yet another name to add to his growing list of war-heroes and dead friends. The whole world was stupid.

Harry shot to his feet, stumbling over the edge of the rug and bursting through the door, just as Nymphadora Tonks shot to her feet and knocked her chair backwards, bellowing something along the lines of "That's not possible!" through a sheet of tears. No one noticed his absence, which made Harry wonder if he'd been there at all.

* * *

He was prepared to fight dragons, prepared to battle ogres and demons if the need so arose. He was not prepared for this. No one could be, not the best strategist, nor the most divine, Merlin himself couldn't have predicted this happening, because every once in a while life throws you a loop and you are expected to ride it out.

Before him stood Harry Potter in a towering rage, but he wasn't swinging a fist or his wand, wasn't spitting, or cursing, he was just standing there like Galleta himself, unspeaking. Draco would never admit it, in fact, he didn't think it was possible, but for a split second, he'd been sincerely afraid, and he couldn't say anything in his defense. "What did…" was as far as he got before Harry cut him off with, "You're late."

Potter sent him a note through a very discreet house elf with instructions to meet him here at precisely one am. He'd been here only once before and was never allowed inside, but he got the distinct impression that it did not typically look like this, nor was it usually this cold. No room so deep within a castle could possibly be so cold and windy, he felt like his skin was being stripped from his bones, or that he could fall over at any moment, the wind was quite literally strong enough to throw the words back in his face, he felt every sound wave smacking against his cheeks like tiny pieces of sand caught in the draft and seeking solace on his face. He felt Potter's words too, and shuddered. He hadn't been able to find his way here very easily, the room kept moving away from him, and every time he tracked it down, a distraction spell would cause him to forget the password. The room didn't like him, and neither, he felt, did its occupant. "Just a little payback." He said, and very seriously doubted that Potter could hear him.

Draco sat up in the silence of the Slytherin 6th year dorms. Crabbe was snoring like a hacksaw two beds down, his constant counterpart making no less noise between them. Draco's skin itched furiously, it was freezing below ground, and wind was howling in through the high vents, adding to the bedroom cacophony. Bloody Potter.

* * *

There was yet another announcement, another moment of silence, another stifled sob in the back of every classroom. Hermione was doubled over crying through lunch; Marjorie was rubbing her back consolingly, unable, because of her growing child, to embrace her best friend.

In the melodramatic aftermath of Dumbledore's public announcement, Harry could feel the fickle eyes of the student body fall away from him and slide across the polished floor to the Headmaster. It was a strange sensation, one of relief, and sorrow. Harry had resigned himself to a life of constant surveillance, he resented every moment of fame he'd ever suffered since arriving at Hogwarts, but the sudden redirection of attentions had been a clear indication of humanity's lack of faith in him.

The pressure was off, he was free to do anything he wanted, catch up on school work, dance a jig, crack a smile… grieve. His scar itched, he hadn't paid attention to it yesterday, but surely it had been irritated then too and he was only now taking the time to notice it. What did that mean? He didn't have Ron to complain to, Hermione was unavailable for comment, Hagrid couldn't make him a stoat sandwich while Harry took him for granted, it was all very strange, surreal even, that this should happen now. When he least needed it, or when he most did; Harry frowned contemplatively and pushed soggy roast beef around his plate, carving mindless squiggles in the lumpy gravy. The house elves too, were in mourning it appeared, because the potatoes were half mashed and still had thick garlic cloves in them: no one was eating.

A loud and rancorous protest had arisen from Slytherin, Harry recognized the nasal whine of more than one of his classmates across the hall, how tragic it would be for them to miss a single meal for someone else's pain. The thought brought a wry smile to Harry's face, beside him, Neville choked on a lump of starch, "My Grams' is worse." He said by way of explanation, and turned back to his plate.

"Young Mister Potter." Greeted him from just down the hall, most students were on the pitch enjoying a rare sunny moment, taking a reprieve from the convenient grief that plagued their lives when it suited them. Two weeks after Hagrid was pronounced dead, every student in Hogwarts had stopped wearing their house arm-bands, Harry shrugged them off into the bottom of a trunk like all the rest, assuming they'd be brought out and dusted off at some juncture.

"Alastor." Never before would he have thought of addressing Moody this way, he wasn't precisely sure why he was doing so now, possibly because Alastor Moody had become such a recognized figure in his life he was no longer in awe of his seeming omnipresence. Dumbledore had hired him on, part care-taker, part-guardian, part paranoid entertainment – let's remind ourselves that not all is as bad as it could be, Students, let me re-introduce you to Alastor Moody, he's going to be our dancing bear this term, isn't that exciting? Harry chuckled and didn't know why he did that either.

"Is there something on your mind Mister Potter?" Wasn't there always? Was it possible to be completely devoid of thought; was it possible to not have something on your mind? Yesterday's breakfast, your third grade primary teacher, tomorrow's socks, there was always something floating around in the murky grey-matter of a human being's mind.

Harry vaguely wondered if things would be better if it were possible, to completely clear your thoughts, to empty your head into a glass jar for a rough scrubbing while your body sat back and drooled. "Nothing at all."

"Why aren't you outside with the other students?" What he didn't say, but clearly meant to, was "it's difficult to keep to the herd when stray sheep insist on wandering," Dumbledore's sheep herders would just have to accommodate a few errant individuals, Harry among them. Besides, what safer place was there than Hogwarts?

He considered coming up with a cock-and-bull headache story, but thought it was too much effort to waste on such an obvious cause. He was doing nothing wrong by being in the halls on a Saturday afternoon, so he got straight to the point, "Is there something you needed?" Such an interesting expression, 'get to the point' 'cut to the chase' like someone fast-forwarding a videotape of life, cut to the chase scene, move on to the interesting bits and for god's sake, leave out what you had for an afternoon snack unless it was poisoned or otherwise important. CUT!

Moody was taken aback, or at least that's what Harry read the twisted grimace on his face to be. He imagined it was a bit like a watchdog being handed home-made peanut butter cookies by a criminal: confusion, a little indignation, and the slightest bit of gratitude. "Potter," he said gruffly, putting on the stern, probably-practiced professor's face, he must have picked it up from McGonagall, "if you're planning something, and I know you are, because you're always planning something, don't. Or at least before you do, tell Dumbledore will you?"

Well that was the bit of fatherly advice for the day, it had been Dumbledore yesterday, Flitwick the day before, Harry was so full of fatherly advice it was as though one of his many father figures had been reincarnated for the sole purpose of giving those necessary 'becoming a man' speeches that every normal boy goes through. Harry couldn't understand how they kept a straight face; he certainly couldn't, or wouldn't have if his face hadn't been straight for months before.

He considered telling Moody that it was never his plan. He had half an idea, Ron built it into something grand, Hermione refined it and got them through it, but it was never Harry with the plan. Never Harry that managed to get the secrets out of the staff, never Harry that did the research, never Harry that did anything but be Harry Potter and that seemed to work. He survived because he survived before, not because of a plan, not because of heroic effort, just because he was. He didn't have a plan, he had the opposite of a plan: entropy personified. He considered telling Moody all of this and more, but all that came out was, "Will do, Alastor."

* * *

And we're done! Review if you will… (You know you desperately want to) I'm thinking of a "review for new chapters" scheme you see, and so new chapters will be posted a good deal faster if I get lots and lots of your lovely reviews.

Later Days!


	15. Demands

**Disclaimer:** Unless Warner Brothers and JKRowling were feeling really REALLY generous this holiday season – I don't own Harry Potter. I did just get Harry Potter Scene It for Christmas though – my mom is awesome.

**Notes:** PLOT! Oh my god the world may end. :D Ah but I jest. Yes – there's some plot in here… sort of. HarryDraco interaction at least.

**Okay – **I know I'm not technically supposed to do this since there's that whole 'reply' feature on the review boards, and I JUST learned about it so hopefully no one's going to bitch at me. (Fortunately, rarely am I popular enough to be discovered by any eeeevil eeeevil minions of silly rules), but I just feel the absolute need to thank my reviewers up at the front of my story because EVERYONE, not just them, should learn how wonderful and fabulous they really really are and how much I love them – so without further ado.

**Neverbird: **Ah my sole reviewer, Nev, I demand you never change. You really have no idea how awesome you are – even though I make you sad then make you sadder you keep coming back to read Twasits for me and that means SO much. And if I were you – because this is ironic – I wouldn't worry about Hagrid TOO much ;D.

On with the show!

* * *

**Chapter 15:** Demands

Remus Lupin stared into the bottle of amber enlightenment, it was half gone and he could feel it working its fiery magic into his veins and under his skin. Snape had been by, Snape was always by it seemed, mocking him from a position of experience. As far as he was concerned, Snape could choke on his churlishness; he had enough to worry about. However, as much as he loathed the greasy bastard, Snape served his purpose, and he was grateful despite his drunken muttering to a tapestry that was attempting to walk off its stitching and into a portrait, or was that just his head swimming? He took another pull at the bottle to clear it, which worked much better than he would have liked it to for all of a second.

Severus had been by with a wolfsbane treatment this evening, Lupin hadn't touched the vile drink in months, he couldn't stand the flavor after so long in the wilderness, hunting rabbits and breathing free air. It was hard to return to humanity, so hard, so many painful memories associated with the bi-peds. But he did, because the hard route was often the right one, his father told him that before he passed away, and it was a fragment of memory he would retain until the day he died. So two days hence, he would be contentedly locked in a storage closet howling at an empty bucket instead of the moon.

With any luck, such crude liquor wouldn't counteract the effects of the potion; he'd never experimented with it before. Always so serious, responsible, tutor, teacher, perfect prefect Remus, with his head on his shoulders and his feet firmly attached to the floor. Sirius was always the heavy drinker, "I'm Black Irish" he would claim, "I need to drink, it's a bloody tradition!" a tradition that carried far past it's prime and long into empty nights of sitting in front of the Black Mansion fireplace waiting for an urgent floo.

He resented everything about those nights; the cheap wine, the dust, the dimly lit room, the forced conversation with his best friend, stupid, arrogant, smug Severus gloating over the whole thing. Remus wanted to leave and never come back, rejoin the world he'd left before returning to Hogwarts, life in motels and hostels across Europe, before Sirius escaped, before his teaching term, before he knew the truth about 50 percent of the scenarios he'd been basing his entire philosophy around. When Sirius was a murderer, when Peter was dead, when Voldemort was a pureblood, half-dead wizard, when Hogwarts was still a learning institution instead of a make-shift army headquarters, when the Minister of Magic was semi-competent, when Hagrid was a friendly groundskeeper and nothing more, not charged with any responsibilities outside caring for the cabbages.

Maybe when he woke up, this would all seem so funny to him. It would all be a spectacularly detailed dream and he would laugh in relief, everyone would be alive, or not yet born, Sirius would be hanging Snape by his ankles, displaying for all the world to see his dirty shorts, and for once, Remus would join in the laughing. Whiskey burned a line of fire down his throat and into his belly, his head spun around the room, laughing as carvings and gilded picture frames flowed into the gaudy wallpaper. All the werewolves would be alive, the Giants wouldn't have lost their survival senses, the vampires would be few and far between, and the fantasy world he was living in now would melt away like butter.

Idle fancies didn't last long in his mind, his head was out of the clouds, he would always be sharp and practical, even when severely inebriated, the dead weren't worth resurrecting. Remus snorted sarcastically and thumped the bottle back on his desk, his head followed shortly after.

* * *

Draco Malfoy was practically skipping down the hall, or would have been if not for the riving agony of over taxed muscles. He was in fact limping down the remarkably empty hall, but it was a back and forth gait nonetheless, where his left foot refused to touch the ground for more than a second. He had been working his team to the point of exhaustion for over a week, every afternoon after classes he dragged the Slytherin team out to the pitch to work on everything from evasive maneuvers to aggressive broom work, and every night someone complained of screaming muscles and a severe headache. Draco made them run laps. That wasn't to say that he wasn't just as tired, just as sore, and just as pissed at himself as the rest of the team, but he had other things on his mind, and if it took falling unconscious the moment his head hit his pillow at night to stop his recurring nightmares, it was worth it.

If only stupid Bole had turned right he wouldn't be having this problem. Draco expected from his Quidditch team the same effort that he gave, though he was frequently disappointed by their lack of devotion. When Draco called out "RIGHT!" at his chaser, his chaser should have gone right, the play would have worked magnificently, Bole would have gotten the Quaffle, and practice wouldn't have been cut off two hours before it should have been due to injury. Instead, when Draco zoomed in for the snitch Bole turned left, there was a collision, and he found himself on the ground before he could even blink, ankle twisted under him, and Bole lying across his other leg with a broken arm. The bastard didn't even have the courtesy to roll off him before he started screaming, pathetic little worm.

So it was the last thing he expected, when the entire school was at dinner and he was trying to hobble his way to the Great Hall without any assistance from his vindictive team, when someone caught him by the shoulder and shoved him against the wall. "We need to—" he heard, then Draco lashed out in resentment and panic, catching his assailant in the side with a left hook. "Oomph," Said Harry Potter as he doubled over wheezing.

Draco flailed a bit to catch himself from falling over and chuckled, "Sorry about that Potter," he said smugly, "it's one of my better instincts concerning you."

Harry blinked, "As I was saying," Malfoy had actually apologized, he was still an egotistic ass about it, but he'd apologized, it was somewhat disorienting. "We need to talk."

"After dinner."

"Now."

"Potter, I'm starving, so unless you want to do this in the Great Hall, I suggest you wait."

"You can eat later."

Draco mentally kicked himself. Experience taught him that he should have kept his big mouth shut, but that was a skill he'd never been particularly adept at. In fact, where Potter was involved, his brain refused to keep him silent, leading to a number of black eyes and broken artifacts. But this was different, if only slightly, and he was furious with himself for asking in the first place. Now he had no excuse, he could allow himself no juvenile cruelty by habit because he had asked for this and there was no avoiding it. Draco should have known better, he should have realized that Potter was turning barbarous and was not abject to betraying him to the cruel world of schoolyard politics. Once again, he was hip deep in his own shit, and he'd put himself there. Potter was in the position of power, he had blackmail material, Draco had asked for help, and now he was beginning to panic. "When was the last time _you _ate?"

Harry shrugged. Questions like that were largely pointless, if his inability to eat or sleep was affecting his performance in school, it was no more so than his sense of overwhelming responsibility and failure. He had come to a conclusion this morning at precisely 4:43am, and the thought refused to leave his head. He'd half-fallen out of his bed and into the hallway outside Gryffindor when he realized that he didn't know the password to the Slytherin dorms, and even if he'd managed to figure it out, he didn't know which dorm Malfoy was in. So Harry waited out the entire day, he went to all of his classes in hopes of catching the Slytherin but forgot it was Tuesday, the one day of the week where the rivaling houses didn't see each other at all. After classes, by the time he realized that Slytherin was on the pitch practicing, Luna Lovegood had stopped him and started talking about Muggle fairy tales and red-hot shoes with the sort of desperate insanity that you have no choice but to listen to.

"Quid pro quo. I help you get out, you help me."

"How?"

"I don't know yet." It was a stroke of luck that Harry caught up to him in the hall while everyone was at dinner, whatever his previous inclinations towards humiliating Malfoy, this was one conversation that he vitally needed to have in private. There were no portraits in this hall, most of the pictures of long-dead wizards were confined to the higher levels, but Harry glanced around anyway. "Malfoy, do you have the Dark Mark?"

Draco twitched and considered running away, only to find the wall behind him. Was this the only wall in Hogwarts that didn't lead somewhere else? it was perfectly ridiculous. Potter had a crazed look about him, his former dead-goldfish look had become something more like a swamp-dwelling Kappa with clean skin, Draco suspected that the state of his hair wasn't helping the image. Very carefully, without trusting his mouth to speak, Draco unbuttoned the cuff of his left sleeve and rolled it above his elbow, eyes never losing contact with Potter's.

"Perfect."

* * *

Peter Petigrew had the most annoying tendency to skitter around his fellow Death Eaters. He had never managed to carry himself with the confidence possessed by his fellows, he never really managed to be the self-assured poster boy for evil, and he'd never looked good in a cowl. There had been a time when he regretted what he did. When he thought that maybe he had done the wrong thing, but he had never been as strong as Remus or Sirius, he had never been powerful enough to make his own decisions.

Peter spent his entire life trying desperately to be 'one of the guys', but he never got the joke. Or maybe he was the joke. Wormtail. He had always despised that handle, it was never his choice to become a rat, he would have been anything else if he'd had the option. It couldn't have been as noble as a snake, couldn't have been as powerful as the stag or the Grim, he had to become the rat, and he'd resented it for as long as he could remember.

It was moments few and far between where he felt truly privy to something greater than his isolation. When for a brief second all four Marauders connected on a level that they all related to, even if it was just reminiscing about the old days studying together, or sneaking into the kitchens. But more and more he had begun to realize that he and his so-called friends were irreparably different, he was meek, he was timid, he was milquetoast, he was the very mouse he became in animus, and the boys he'd spent all of his school years with were so very much the opposite. They moved, they shook, they left little things behind, the little things that Peter seemed so bogged down in, and Peter hated it. He fell asleep at night wrapped up in his jealousy and praying for the day that they would be jealous of him, that they'd no longer be ignorant of his spite.

James had his girlfriend, later his wife. Remus had the best marks in school, and the best potential career path. Sirius had everything and the freedom of more. Peter had begun to hate them all, because all he had was them, and eating their dust was the most dissatisfying meal known to man. So when he was offered the opportunity to be something better, when the idea presented itself, he always thought "now they'll see, they'll sit up and pay attention, I'll be the strong one now," but it wasn't the case there either. He betrayed them hoping to feel vindicated, hoping to make them see the pain he'd endured on their behalf, as the butt of their jokes and their oh-so-convenient release from boredom.

Instead he felt no better, and no worse than he always had. So pathetic, so worthless, something less than human, because he met none of the qualifications as a Death Eater, and he had consciously destroyed everything he'd known. Did he regret it now? Yes, in the sense that one regrets kicking a wall, not because the wall is harmed, but because it hurts the kicker's foot.

Peter regretted nothing about losing his friends; he was awarded a posthumous First Class Merlin award in which he took an absurd amount of pride, though he had done nothing to earn it. He didn't regret leaving everything behind, because there was really nothing there to be left. He did, however, despise, "Wormtail!"

"Yes My Lord?" It was a knee jerk reaction brought on by fifteen years of servitude, when Voldemort said jump, he jumped. James, Remus and Sirius had used him, they used him as entertainment, they used him to supply the butterbeer, but it was so trivial. Peter had been so concerned, so frustrated, so pained by their inconsequential requests that he hadn't realized that larger demands would be made of him in the future, things that reached far beyond sneaking to the kitchens alone for the sandwiches.

"Ah yes, Wormtail, my most accomplished animagus." Peter twitched and flexed his paw – hand. Voldemort rarely spoke in that oily tone, Peter knew precisely what it meant and didn't appreciate it at all. He was going out, potentially never coming back, would the gods curse him for abandoning his post once more; first as the fourth marauder, now as Voldemort's aid. Would he burn in hell for being disloyal or just burn in hell for all the heinous acts he had committed? If he left Voldemort's service now, would there ever be a way to strike out on his own, be his own man, live as he should have from the beginning, or would he be forever doomed for his crimes? When Voldemort used that tone, Peter vaguely wondered if there were any job openings in Muggle retail. "I need you to return to Hogwarts."

Of course, back into the lion's den – literally, he could almost hear the unspoken 'Gryffindor Dorms' – and back to the one place where he would undoubtedly be spotted. If he did choose to leave, if he could in fact get away from the long reach of the Dark Mark could he live somewhere else? Would Voldemort really waste the time and resources hunting him down, or would he just leave off knowing that Peter knew if he wanted to, he would be there to destroy him. Peter often pondered the scenario, he wondered if he could stand the oppressive knowledge that Voldemort could, in fact, strike him down from a distance at any time he chose. "To do what Master?"

"Nothing terribly difficult I should think." If Voldemort was a terrifying prospect when he was being sly, he was worse when flippant. "Not terribly difficult" was easily translated as "the hardest thing you'll ever have to do but if you don't do it I'll make the punishment so severe you'll wish you had and been caught out..." Peter tried not to shudder, he tried so very hard to look up at Voldemort lovingly, but the truth was that he was hideous, and terrible; would people hire him with a silver hand? Could he get by wearing a glove every day, claim discomfort and self-consciousness of a prosthetic limb?

"I need you to spy for me. Watch carefully what the people around you do, especially Potter. If you must, Severus Snape's dungeons undoubtedly have a few nooks and crannies you could easily squeeze yourself into. Though I daresay a rat with a silver paw will be a bit conspicuous, so let's just remove that shall we?" Voldemort flicked his wand, and Peter screamed as the metal limb he'd been wearing for nearly a year was ripped from him, leaving the wasted stump of his arm, twitching furiously in the dim light. He closed his eyes against the image, and gritted his teeth against the pain, heart pounding, face sweating, it was going to kill him. This alliance with Voldemort was going to kill him. Now would be the perfect time to leave, he could actually escape. "Now go."

He could leave, abandon this futile cause, he had never believed anyway, not really, not enough for it to really be worth it…. Maybe? "Yes master."

* * *

End! I feel so bad for Remus in this chapter - SO bad for Remus. Poor fella, all of his friends are dead. If you want to feel even worse for Remus though, I have a one shot called something like "Not Remembering You" (Or something, I change my titles frequently, who's to keep track?) that people might like. Anyway! If you're feeling in the holiday spirit, or just need to rack up some good Karma before the year is out - Please Review. For you, For me, For the Karma Weasles of Happy. 


	16. Just Ask

**Disclaimer: **Me no own. You no sue. Qui?

**Notes: **So – it's Christmas … technically. For 2 more hours anyway. And in light of that I've decided to be unusually generous and just post two chapters tonight. Especially since this one's title makes me laugh so hard today. So I'm not sure if I love it or hate it, there's sap, there's scary, there's REALLY BAD HOLE in the… well, yeah, just a really bad hole. But I can think of no better time to reveal it than now. So

**Happy Christmas** – or if you're not Christian "Happy over commercialized holiday where people get lots of gifts they mostly don't use." Chapters and Cookies for all!

* * *

**Chapter 16:** Ask, ye shall Receive 

"Professor Snape?"

Severus Snape straightened up at the knock on his office door, for the last two hours he'd been praying for a distraction from the mediocre-at-best essays written by his students. Not one of them had a grasp of what it truly was to create a potion specifically formulated to affect the psyche. Granger's, of course, had been perfect, text book even, but she didn't seem to understand the actual consequences of brewing a formula like truth serum. Potter's was strangely insightful, but lacking in the inherent logical values of the potion itself. Longbottom's was an utter waste of time. Through the Slytherins, who were by and large the worst students he'd ever had by being lazy and arrogant with the possible exception of Malfoy, who was lazy and arrogant, but also a decent potion's student. Through the Ravenclaws, who were all so academic and blind to the expository repercussions, and now onto the Hufflepuffs, for which he usually required a glass of brandy to survive. "Come in."

"Professor Snape," Said Potter, a most unwelcome intrusion coming through his door. "I was wondering…"

"If this has anything to do with your potions grade, Potter, forget it. You refused to come to my class, costing your house five points a day I might add," Harry winced, Severus reveled in his point. He wasn't constantly at war with his students, he was dictator, he ruled the classroom and petty arguments with one student or another was a waste of his time, but Potter was and always had been different, so in this instance, he felt the need to indulge in trivial conflict. "and you failed your labs, the blame is on you."

"For once," Muttered Harry, he didn't like Snape, and Snape didn't like him; neither party made it a secret, and pretending otherwise would be absurd. Harry had entered Snape's office in the hopes that they could have a rational discussion as adults, conveniently forgetting his cantankerous professor's vendetta against his entire family. "Professor," he said, "I'll be blunt. We both resented Occlumency lessons, but if you would be willing to spare some of your free time to resume said lessons, I would greatly appreciate it." The forced politeness made his teeth hurt, but he needed this. Harry couldn't afford to let anyone into his head, even if it took endless hours with Snape to build the right barriers.

Severus could feel a headache of epic proportions growing behind his eyes, using mind magic would keep it there for months. This was just like Potter, just like it to torture him by asking a favor that they both knew could be an order. If Potter had gone to Dumbledore with the same request… why hadn't Potter gone to Dumbledore? Last year when the Order was so weak and so many blows against the side of the light had been struck, it only made sense that he should teach Potter the art of Occlumency, because Dumbledore had his hands full, and through Potter's mind it would be very easy to spy on the venerable Headmaster, but why now? Was Potter so stupid he hadn't realized that Dumbledore was perhaps the best legilimens in the world, or did he think it was still unsafe for Dumbledore to be teaching him? Dumbledore's office was so plastered in defense and guard spells that not even a hoard of magic users, mind probes or not, could get through without the proper intentions (or at very least the password). Severus was going to lose his mind if he kept asking himself questions. He may well have already. "Would you mind explaining your sudden change of heart?"

This was enough of a risk already; if Snape managed to figure things out before he learned to defend himself he would be royally screwed. Harry seethed, and did the only thing available to him: he lied, and even the lying grated on him, "I've been having nightmares that can't possibly be from my head, and my scar has been…" Harry left off gesturing feebly, there really was no way to describe what it felt like when his scar started 'acting up' didn't define it, and 'sending excruciating bolts of pain directly into my brain' was a bit wordy.

"Enough Potter," Severus rubbed his temple with long, bony fingers. He would have to inform the Headmaster of course, a request like Potter's could only mean trouble, but he didn't have to do anything right away. He had always been furious with Death Eaters that went running straight to Voldemort at the first sign of anything, "A mouse squeaked in the corner your lordship! What do I do?" It was one of the many things that he despised about Voldemort's organization, the complete lack of autonomy. He absolutely refused to go running to Dumbledore without some proper motivation, or at least evidence to support his claims. "You will resume your remedial potions studies Monday after dinner. Now please get out of my office."

Harry nodded a thanks and left, shutting the door behind him with a soft thud. Severus ground his teeth in fury and irritably and stamped a large T on the top of Hannah Abbot's paper without bothering to read it.

**

* * *

**

"Ugh, I do so long for the days of a twenty inch waist." Marjorie Durham was now officially an honorary member of Gryffindor, and making very good use of their most comfortable couch.

"With any luck, you'll have it back in a few months." Hermione said, squinting over the top of her massive Astronomy book, she would have to discuss a pair of glasses with her family this summer. There were more important things to worry about of course, surviving in a suddenly Muggle-unfriendly world listing high among them, but her rate of survival would be significantly increased if she knew how to defend herself, and learning how to defend herself required the ability to see the blackboard while Professor Flitwick's unfortunate clone scribbled DADA notes with an independent piece of chalk. "In the mean time, we'll just get you a crane to haul you up here."

"Ha ha, very funny Miss Crane. Wanna help me up? I don't think I can lie down anymore." Marjorie heaved herself into Hermione's arms and with a great deal of assistance managed to sit upright. Once she had reached this stage of her pregnancy; that was, the horrible, sweaty, burning, I need pecan chicken NOW! followed by unexplained bouts of tears and intermittent bitching about the general nature of uncomfortable pillows stage, they had both gotten a lot of practice with moving her around the castle. It was a miracle that Hermione hadn't spelled her into a permanent sleep, Marjorie knew she was capable. In fact, Hermione herself was a bit of a miracle, Marjorie had once burst into tears because she had to suffer through potions class with the Ravenclaws instead of Gryffindor, and she just couldn't do it without someone there, so Hermione marched up to Professor Sprout and demanded that Marjorie's schedule be temporarily altered to fit Gryffindor's.

She was beginning to think that Hermione could do anything. Like a comic book heroine Hermione could save the world in a heart beat, stop rampaging elephants from destroying town square, and still be home in time to study up for exams. Marjorie felt so useless by comparison, like a textbook damsel in distress – well, almost, she wasn't a virgin chained to a pillar by any means, then again, she and this couch had become rather attached. At least not a virgin then. "Hermione… you're my only friend."

"I'm sure that's not true." The other students belonging to the Gryffindor dorm were milling about their own business, laughing and smiling like they had always done in the past. There were few frowns in the assembled crowd today, which came as no surprise to Hermione, she too had found herself smiling and laughing as though nothing were wrong. Nothing was wrong, life moved on, Ron would be so disappointed with her for not moving on, or she hoped this was the case because if it wasn't she couldn't bear the weight of her guilt. People placated themselves with these silly little thoughts, their loved ones surely wouldn't want them to be so miserable with the time they had left, when the plain truth was that people were vindictive and jealous, and it was beyond her to guess at what they really wanted, so she chose not to think about it at all.

Hermione gently sat down and laid her ear against Marjorie's belly, feeling her distant heartbeat and the closer heartbeat of her unborn child. "Oh! He kicked!" She said enthusiastically, planting a dry kiss over the infant's assumed foot and smiling up at his mother. "I love it when that happens."

"So I noticed." Marjorie took the uncomfortable squirming of her baby with both affection and bittersweet resentment. She loved the baby, of course she did, having endured 7 months of vomiting, cravings, hot flashes, sweaty bed sheets, hormonal surges, terrible acne, back aches, tears, swollen feet, and sleeping on her side she had no choice but to love it, but life would have been so much easier without. For the past two thirds of a year she'd been debating with herself, keep him, raise him, abort him, give him up…. Her father was never going to forgive her, no matter which path she chose, when her father re-wrote his will she would undoubtedly be disowned. Her parents were purebloods, traditional, stern, with enough daughters to infiltrate all of Great Britain, they didn't need her, and after the shining examples that her many siblings had set she would always be the odd one out.

For a moment, tears of hatred and frustration welled up in her eyes once more, she had been fighting them for weeks. This was all her fault of course; there was nothing to be done about it now. She had been sorted into Hufflepuff. She got pregnant. The father was Muggle. All facts, but she couldn't rely on any Muggle institution, orphanage, or foster program to raise her child; she would do it herself, even if she had to do it alone, but that's what she had Hermione for. The baby kicked again, and Hermione kissed her belly in reward, Marjorie tangled swollen her fingers in Hermione's thick hair, and said, "Would you be his Godmother?"

* * *

He had never before realized, having spent so little time here, how stuffy this room must get. Old people were always keeping things so much hotter than they needed to be, as though with age people turned into lizards and they needed stifling heat just to keep moving. Or maybe it was the presence of the thirty-eight former Headmasters and Headmistresses that were crowding the far wall and somehow making it harder to breathe. 

Draco had no love of the man belonging to this office, but he had to respect a man who had risen to the top both politically and academically in such a difficult time. One might say he had all of Great Britain in his pocket. Draco would say he'd bitten off more than he could chew. "Ah Mister Malfoy, I was expecting you." Said Dumbledore, entering his office at long last, of course he'd been 'expecting him,' Draco had made the appointment a week ago. "Is there something you wished to discuss with me?"

"Actually, Professor, there is." Draco fought to keep his eyes from rolling in his head, this meeting was actually vital. Ordinarily he wouldn't care, he would, could, and quite frequently did, sneak off without permission whenever the need suited him, but he wasn't stupid enough to think that the Headmaster, and even Snape, didn't know. Draco forced himself to take a deep breath, "As you know, I've recently come into quite a bit of property, and its contents. I've been receiving owls every morning hounding me to sell, or threatening me to reposes it. I'm actually here to negotiate some freedom of movement from Hogwarts. Of course, I will be attending all of my classes and maintaining my former grade standards, but I need access to my home on the weekends, and perhaps the week days."

Dumbledore stared, Draco fought the urge to squirm uncomfortably. There was no ulterior motive, it was absolutely correct that he had been receiving a record amount of owls, all concerning his recent inheritance, and he did, in fact, need to attend to some business that he simply could not conduct from Hogwarts. Dumbledore began kneading his chin and 'hmm'd pensively, Draco took a deep breath and realized his heart was pounding. He always got this feeling around the headmaster; such close contact with him actually made him dizzy, like he'd spent the last five minutes locked in combat and was just catching his breath. "You realize, Mister Malfoy," Draco could actually hear the capital Ms, "That allowing you to leave the premises at any time is highly unusual, and that your safety is my personal responsibility until you are released into the custody of your guardians or you become an adult in the eyes of the state."

"Yes sir." What else was there to say?

"However, under the circumstances," He was of course referring to the fact that his parents were known affiliates of the Death Eaters and that his aunt, the woman who'd been named his godmother, was also very much one of Voldemort's minions and a convicted felon. The Malfoy family had very distinct inheritance stipulations – if the inheriting party was not yet an adult in the eyes of wizardom their legal guardian or caretaker would inherit in their stead until the named person came of age (if they ever came of age): however, if that party had been convicted of a felony or was otherwise viewed unfavorably in the eyes of the court the named party inherited regardless of age. Malfoy's didn't care if their family were criminals, they only cared if they got caught. It was times like this that Draco didn't know whether to be grateful for his family's associations, or disgusted. "I do believe some allowances may be made." Dumbledore reached for a quill and ink, Draco heaved a sigh of relief.

He had prepared at least three different speeches in case Dumbledore had said no, realizing that he wouldn't have to use any of them was a bit disappointing. "But sir, I have no one at home that I trust to do this in my stead and given the extenuating circumstances…" or "But sir, you must understand that with my father away and my mother recently deceased that Gringotts Bank is attempting to take advantage of my current financial situation…" or the unrefined but equally effective, "I appreciate your point of view Sir, but due to my recent losses, and the successful nature of my OWL scores, I believe I must take this opportunity to leave Hogwarts as a free party."

"Thank you, sir."

"I'm afraid I can't allow you to leave the school during the days we have class, but I see no reason why you should not be allowed home during the weekends. Was there anything else you wanted to discuss with me?"

"No sir."

* * *

The library was dark but for a few lit candles at the end of each book shelf. Though it was the weekend, and there was technically an extended curfew within the school, most people had gone to bed (if not necessarily their own), and wouldn't be caught dead in the almost-deserted library anyway. This was that famous moment in history when the hero took initiative, begging for a simple answer and finding none, with no convenient catalysts in the form of newspapers or large spiders he had to forcibly cause change. It was a nightmare, and he'd asked a nightmare for help. There was no logical pattern to this, nor motivation outside of 'Voldemort should die'; Harry was working towards that goal but without a reference point, what was Voldemort doing, where was he vulnerable, why is none of our intelligence being filtered down to me? Harry let his head fall onto the table with a sharp thud, before he lifted it up and let it drop again. He repeated this process several times, beating a rhythmic tattoo against the table, "That did not work." 

Draco Malfoy looked at him with something akin to amusement; no he didn't imagine that it would work. He found it hard to believe that so many people had faith in this idiot, it was impossible that the fate of the entire world rested on his too-skinny shoulders. "Good grief Potter, it's a wonder you survived First Year if this is how you go about research."

"I don't _do_ research." Harry mumbled back, "Hermione does research, I copy her notes." Mentally he awarded himself the 'most pathetic human on the planet' award and waited for Malfoy to start laughing. He usually let the clues fell into his lap, or into Hermione's lap, she was the smart one, the one that put things together, he and Ron just listened to her until they too were curious enough to get involved. Hermione saw the right newspapers, she understood riddles about roosters, she was the one that figured out the werewolf clues that Snape kept dropping, Harry was just the one that waved the wand. "I'm just so damned confused… I don't know where to start," he whined into the table.

Malfoy didn't, in fact, laugh. He too sighed and his head joined Harry's on the misused table, Harry's nose was only six inches away. He was actually beginning to understand Voldemort's absolute frustration and the obsession with his enemy. How to counter the agenda of someone whose plans were so obscure and irrelevant to the present situation it was absolutely unfathomable? Kill Harry Potter. Well that was obvious, it was always the scenario, but precisely how he had intended it was beyond them both, so what were they supposed to do now? It was like being told to solve a puzzle without having any pieces; Harry's wasn't the only head that was pounding.

"I'm so tired."

"We all are Potter." The gears in his head were grinding against one another, like there was gravel caught in the wheels, any minute now things would come to a complete halt and he'd be left a drooling idiot in the middle of an un-findable room. Nothing was ever simple and straightforward. Trelawney couldn't have had a vision about tea saucers or the local dog population, it had to be big and complex, even in death she was a drama-queen; Draco could spit. Malfoy closed his eyes, recalling the words of his fathers with a sad sort of pity. 'The key to the enemy's power lies in his deepest desires. His needs. Food, sleep, love… only by exploiting these do you achieve your ends' Draco sighed. "We can't starve the Dark Lord, we can't keep him awake at night – he does not love – so what does he _want_?"

Harry hadn't slept in a month. What had he been doing with his time? Harry had reached a point in his life where he was quite literally too tired to care and his thought process had degenerated into petulant whining. So what if Malfoy was Malfoy, and so what if he was showing all of his weaknesses? He was just about tired enough to die without any assistance. Wouldn't that be appropriate? He could just keel over dead in Hogwarts and leave Voldemort to sort out how he'd done it. "Me?"

"Well it's not as though we can gift wrap you." Harry laughed and somewhere in the recesses of Draco's mind it clicked – gift. The wheels had begun to turn, dust was getting ground out of the gears and something had clicked into place where there had been nothing but an overabundance of cobwebs before. "Potter!" The dust shook.

"What?"

Draco took a deep and steadying breath, doing his best not the strangle the boy who should have died. "You are not helping." He said in perfect control. "He must want something more than just _you_, something… really important. Trelawney said something about-"

Harry cut him off, "Trelawney said? Since when did you take divination?" Nothing that Malfoy had said in the last five minutes made any sense – not that Malfoy generally did make sense, but Harry was expecting coherency at least.

"Until fourth year, but that's not the point! On Halloween she –" Harry listened intently, halting the impulse to interrupt with indignation and rage. Had Malfoy given them this information earlier they would have … been stuck. Harry was bullocks at deciphering prophecies until they happened, and even then it was tentative. So Harry held his peace and paid attention as Draco repeated the words of the prophecy.

"The witch of the mire…"

"It's an allusion to the Swamp Witch."

"Who was, I'm assuming, a witch that lived in a swamp?" Surely someone had snuck into his room at night and replaced his brain with a large ball of cotton. Harry was so tired, he could hardly breathe – witches from swamps, mires, bogs, or any other synonym of mud weren't holding his interest.

"Don't be obvious Potter," Sit up straight, no elbows on the table, always remember when speaking to foreign dignitaries to be very polite: Harry wondered if Malfoy knew he sounded like a school-marm. "People only call her a swamp witch because that's where she DIED."

Harry squinched his eyes shut with the hopes that opening them would make that statement a bit clearer. So Professor Trelwaney, in her infinite wisdom, had given them a prophecy about an obviously dead witch and left him wondering how the hell that was supposed to help. Was she going to rise from the dead in a cloud of mist and smoke to smite his villains from afar? His brain rallied at the unnecessary sarcasm enough for him to say, "Well then what did she do when she was alive?"

"She poisoned her step-daughter." Malfoy returned automatically, rummaging around in his satchel for his history book.

Harry coughed, or did something similar. Until now, his experience with witches and wizards had been limited to the good, moderately good, and the extraordinarily evil. There black and white spectacles of his youth had been replaced by shades of grey and angry reckoning that determined what was truly evil or an act of necessity. "Why?"

"Ah hah!" Malfoy emerged triumphant from the seemingly endless depths of his book bag with their cumbersome history text. Why anyone bothered to actually buy the damned thing was a mystery, because the only thing any student under Binns' instruction used it for was emergency kindling. "Why? Because she was a squib; wouldn't want her tarnishing the family name."

Harry wanted to be outraged; he really wanted to be infuriated that someone had killed a squib simply because she was a squib, but all he did was nod in comprehension. She had been a Squib; he was a Wizard, were they really all that different, couldn't her step mother have locked her in the broom cupboard instead? No really darling, I insist, what if the neighbors were to find out, why… if she never puts a hole in anything, or never winds up bouncing across the front lawn—it will be shame and ruin on the entire family name. It wasn't that Harry was too insulted or upset to speak; he just didn't have anything to say, so he settled for "Oh."

"Well it's not like it mattered, the stupid thing didn't work anyway."

No no, of course it didn't matter. Or it did, Harry knew in his bones that it mattered, someone poisoned her step-daughter because of a non-harmful genetic defect, but he just couldn't be outraged. There was no explosion of righteous litany against biased pure-bloods waiting to explode out of him, though he knew that a year before there would have been. "How do you screw something like that up?"

"That's what the queen was asking."

"What Queen? I thought we were talking about a witch, and who was asking?"  
"The witch was a queen."

"So the queen tried to kill a princess and no one got upset?"

"But she didn't try to kill her, she just poisoned her."

Harry was thoroughly confused, he was trying to understand, Malfoy apparently had the key to killing off the scum in his life, but like a five-year-old was too excited to make sense. Any moment now Malfoy would be repeating himself and saying 'um' every five words, and Harry would be stuck talking to the mental equivalent of a first year, and had no compunctions about saying so.

"Look Potter, I'll go slow for you so you can understand," Harry's mouth twitched unpleasantly at the patronizing tone, it wasn't his fault he couldn't follow the conversation, Malfoy made about as much sense as a drunken teakettle. "The witch under discussion was a queen, or at the very least a holder of a duchy, the myth is a little sparse on detail; the man she married had a daughter who happened to be a squib. Back then there were methods of dealing with such unpleasantness without actually revealing the shameful status, so in order to protect the kingdom, the witch brewed something a lot like the Draught of Sleeping Death, stuck her on a little piece of unplottable land, and that was that."

"Why didn't the witch just kill her then, and make things easier?"

"Because it was illegal you imbecile. Apparently, though they're of no recognizable use to society, it's still a crime against the gods to kill them."

Harry wanted to spit Malfoy's rancor back at him, or at least spit saliva at him. Malfoy's attitude towards squibs and Muggles was deplorable, it made him want to spit and hiss like a particularly mean cat. Instead he settled for, "Fine fine. If she was a queen, why did she die in a swamp?"

"I'm getting to that Potter," Malfoy rolled his eyes and thumbed through a few pages of his history book, digging for the segment on the Swamp Witch. "Some bloody idiot wizard stumbled across the princess, fell in love with her and decided to wake her up and marry her."

"Snow white and the Seven Dwarves, right, I see. And all the deer and rabbits danced and sang in the chorus." He was awake now, and just a bit bitter about it, was he really expected to believe that Trelawney had left them with nothing more than a stupid fairy tale?

"Not exactly, though there may have been rabbit stew. Where do Muggles get these ideas? Like adding dwarves to a story suddenly makes it people-friendly? The Swamp witch is wizard history. When at the white princess's wedding, after prince charming or what's his name awakened her with 'true loves first hackneyed kiss' and a revival spell, they made the queen dance in red hot shoes until she could dance no more and fled into the swamp to live out the rest of her days as the reviled swamp witch." Muggles ruined everything, the witch had poisoned the princess to preserve her honor, she was born a squib, and she would never be worthy of the throne. The witch was only serving her family by ridding them of the shameful princess. It was the way wizarding law worked; the wizard who married the princess had no right to harm the unfortunate witch. Surely when it happened it had been scandalous, but the witch had made herself unpopular elsewhere, and no one had said a word in protest.

Harry couldn't over come his disgust, or he was having a difficult time believing in the stupidity of fate. Had some great and Magical Force really sacrificed Sibyll Trelawney's life as a conduit so he could have greater understanding of a Disney Story? Harry couldn't decide whether to be incredulous or just keep banging his head on the table until it made sense. "So what is the significance of Snow White?"

"The _Swamp Witch,_" Draco said testily, "is a bit of a wizarding joke about failed power schemes, and according to Trelawney, how we're supposed to kill Voldemort, or how he's supposed to kill you, it's all relative."

"How is that Relative?" Malfoy had a disturbing concept of relativity if the death of one individual was equal to the death of another. If Harry managed to kill Voldemort, then hundreds of lives, possibly thousands would be spared his ethnic cleansing campaign. If Voldemort managed to kill Harry… Voldemort would kill Harry. Someone would probably appoint another boy-hero by saying 'oh so it was Neville after all', nothing would really end, it wasn't just the two of them locked in an eternal battle as so many people had romanticized. "Okay, never mind, I see your point. Explain to me how you got all that out of two sentences?"

Draco rolled his eyes and sighed heavily, all the time that Harry spent 'thinking' was obviously wasted if he couldn't put two and two together. "Do try to keep up Potter. The swamp witch poisoned her daughter with an apple, a 'gift' if you will, if we're trying to kill Voldemort, we're going to have to do it the same way."

"By poisoning him, or making him dance in hot shoes?"

Malfoy stared blankly at him for a moment, just a moment composing himself before responding with homicidal rage. "You can't possibly be that dense; via poison I would assume."

"Oh." Said Harry. "So… how do we poison Voldemort?"

"By giving him something he wants I'm sure. How do you poison anyone?"

Harry shrugged, "Right, so… what does Voldemort want?"

Malfoy sneered nastily and slammed his history text shut. "I'm not sure Potter, world peace? Why don't you tell me, you're the idiot who keeps running into him."

Harry would have liked to point out that they weren't exactly meeting for tea every Tuesday, but he abstained from sinking into nastiness and getting nothing done. "Fine fine…" he muttered wearily, replacing his head on the library table. "He wants to steal my soul, and I wouldn't mind a nap."

* * *

END! At least of this chapter. 

Right, in the interest of plot progression, I'm going to ignore the gaping hole in that. It could very well be that the Swamp Witch is an allusion to Voldemort's fall i.e 'failed power schemes' and Harry's scar was the gift he gave– or it could just be a forewarning of failure if they MAKE the gift, failed power schemes again. You get the idea I'm sure. In this case however, it's just going to be a prophecy for ridding ourselves of troublesome little Dark Lords. I'm not ignorant of the hole, just ignoring it.

And now I think you know why I seriously dislike this chapter, but everything has been progressing so slowly. That IS one thing about this story, it's hurry up and wait kinda – like traffic with too many red lights. Alas, one can't have everything, and that's sort of how war works anyway. :D **Anyway! Review, tell me how much you love it. More realistically tell me how much you hate it. I shall love you for it anyway.**

**And Everybody have aFantasticNew Year.**


	17. Gryffindors

**Disclaimer: **I do not own Harry Potter, nor do I own anything associated with the Harry Potter/Warner Bros. franchise. I only own this particular dementia, and therefore am making no profit, do not sue.

**Author's Notes: It's been forever since my last post, I'm soooooorry! **Twasits isn't on hiatus per-se… Yeah, I'm stuck. I mean, I know what I want to write and where I want to write it, but I haven't been able to sit down and actually write a decent sentence, or make it fit, so while Twasits remains firmly in the back of my mind (itching and scratching until I pay it mind and spend hours at a time letting it frustrate me) it might take a while to finish so bear with me on erratic updates and frustrated rambles in my ANs. And even this chapter (Seventeen, oh my god!) is a bit filler – has some important bits and lots of yummy foreshadowing though: hope you like it. Onward ho to what I enjoy most.

**Neverbird: **I'm so glad you liked Snow White, you have no idea how reassuring that is. I was all panicky and going stupid over it (I wrote that over a year ago and it STILL bugs me).

**Dragenphly: **Thank you thank you, I'm so glad you like it and I'm always so excited to see a new reviewer. There will be some nice H/D slash, I PROMISE. I just move really REALLY slowly with some things because it frustrates me so much when there's snogging and then declarations of eternal love (really, I've written whole rants on the subject), but there will be slash, and hopefully it will be worth the wait. And really, it was more of an analogy hole than anything else, I just couldn't think of what to call it. But anyway, thanks so much for your review!

**VampireLouis:** Let me guess, big Anne Rice fan? …me too. As far as I'm concerned your review was perfectly coherent (You said 'tantalizing' I did a little victory dance) – thanks SO much. To be honest, in the first few chapters I was worried about how 'thick' the writing was (frustrates me too), so thank you very much for sticking with it and leaving a review, I don't think there is a graceful way to express exactly how appreciative I am, so I'll just settle for the 'WOO HOO' dance and "Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou!" Hope you like this chapter too. XD.

* * *

**Chapter 17:** Gryffindors

Colin sighed in the dark red confines of his personal dungeon, wrist deep in fixing solution. For five years he had snapped photo after photo at Hogwarts, taking them home to be developed every holiday, where he would spend weeks locked in his basement developing the photos and hardly seeing the distant family he worked so hard for. Last year, however, when asked to produce the photographs for the Reeta Skeeter interview in the Quibbler, he cleared out one of the disused dungeons, and turned it into his personal darkroom. He spent far more time down here than in Gryffindor common, so much time, in fact, that he'd set up a sleeping bag and mobile alarm clock just in case.

Some photos, the happy ones, he still developed the wizarding way. Students trapped in the confines of a photo silently bickered with one another over whose broom was faster, it was a perfect reflection of the attitude in the picture. Happy, alive, free to so-bicker. Others he chose to develop the Muggle way, preserving the moment in absolute stillness. Some wizards disagreed with this policy, and one or two of the more superstitious students had threatened to break his camera if they weren't developed in the 'right' way – to have a piece of their soul trapped on paper was a terrifying prospect. They didn't seem to realize that it was just a photo, just a preservation of a moment in time; if anything had a right to be outraged at his refusal to develop the wizard way, it should have been time.

Colin shrugged out of the solution and used a small hose to rinse it off both the paper and his self. The picture may not have been perfect, Colin's reluctance to see it again had made him slow in removing it from the second solution set, but somehow that made it more intense. The moment he saw Ginny Weasley on the train to Hogwarts in his first year he fell in love with her. Or rather, he fell in love with her complete lack of unwillingness to be photographed, she shone in front of a camera, even if she didn't necessarily realize that pictures were being taken all around her. Even being developed the magical way she tended to stay in the photograph, no matter who saw it.

Colin could hardly bear to look at this picture, he couldn't believe the photographer's audacity, though he had shot it himself. Even under a blue lens, a Weasley was a Weasley; pale, freckled, red headed, and absolutely distinctive despite the vast and varied sights to be seen in the wizarding world, but Colin's mind refused to believe that this was the same Ginny Weasley he'd been photographing for so many years. Two days after the untimely death of her brother, someone had tried to offer his condolences, Colin was just happy to have been there. She had whirled around so fast her hair flew out behind her, her eyes zeroed in on the speaker like missiles, and her mouth became a thin line so fast it would have been impossible to believe: click.

She was so angry, so helpless, in so much pain, and so furious that someone had tried to say "I'm sorry" that he couldn't help himself. His camera was acting faster than his brain, and the moment he'd done it, he began to hate himself. Such profound sorrow, cliché as it was that was the only word for it, wasn't meant to be captured on film, it wasn't a moment privy to prying eyes, but he was developing it anyway, because he owed it to himself, to his camera, and to Ginny. Colin felt he owed it to Ginny to remember her anger and her grief, even if no one else would, he felt he owed her something but knew better than to apologize.

The other pictures he'd taken that day, the entire roll of film seemed trivial by comparison. Some people were crying, others were sitting in stony silence, not a single face was smiling so soon after 6 deaths in a candy-store. He developed them all under the appropriate spells, maybe it was a bit of vindictive cruelty on his part to leave them trapped in photographs where they would be forever sad, forever crying, forever frowning, but they just weren't worthy of that moment in time.

Colin hung the photograph on a line to dry, carefully clipping it into place as the runoff water dripped on to a cloth below. Around it people bickered and cried in their blue-lens surroundings, and Ginny's somewhat over-developed eyes raged out from her never-still companions. Colin found himself staring, oh-so-tempted to take a picture of the picture, from which he quite thankfully refrained. So many faces, all of Hogwarts was on that line; the coveted Harry Potter, the camera hogs, the disinterested, everyone from the lowliest peon (it was a rare thing to capture Peeves on film) to the Headmaster….

For just a moment, Colin suspected that Ginny's was the worst picture he'd ever taken before he sighed, and clicked off the lights.

* * *

Harry's head was pounding as he hauled himself through the portrait hole leading to Gryffindor, the fat lady 'tsk'd at his appearance and admitted him without the password. Harry had gotten farther today than he ever had before, he could almost feel the insides of Snape's skull, just as cold an analytical as the rest of him, if fortunately less greasy. "Did you know…" he said to the room at large as he practically collapsed into a plush armchair next to Hermione, "that in our first year, that Snape actually failed Pansy Parkinson?"

Harry shuddered and sank further into the reassuring furniture, he was so suspicious, so wary of everyone, it was a miracle he didn't have a panic attack every day before class, maybe he did. "Yes, yes I did know that." Said Marjorie from the nearby couch, floundering upright, "Justin Fitch-Fletchy kept saying it was proof that Snape was really a fair teacher."

"Is that why he and Eddie had that horrible spat that November?" Harry vaguely wondered if Hermione was deliberately ignoring him, or if she and Marjorie were just so wrapped up in each other that she was unwilling to even see him. She was lovingly brushing back Marjorie's hair with her hands, treating her like a little doll. Perhaps in a different state of mind he would have found it 'sweet.'

"No… that was something else." Harry's eyebrow twitched pleasantly, was this always the feeling after successfully invading someone's mind? So… infected by the other person's psyche that they couldn't keep their own separate? It gave him a vindictive sort of satisfaction, knowing that Voldemort, and even Dumbledore were probably panicked, twitchy, and left with his constant headache for hours afterward. Was that Snape's thought, or his?

It was so easy to be mistrustful of everyone around him. What were their ulterior motives, who were they working for, what were their long term goals for him? Harry had never bothered to ask Hermione, why she was so intent on him passing his classes and learning the material, but why if not to use him to save Muggle society. He had never before bothered to wonder why Marjorie attached herself to Hermione so quickly, it was to her best advantage, no one else could care for her the way Hermione seemed to. He never before wondered why Ron was so kind to him on the train, because he was Harry Potter, or because he was a scruffy kid? He never thought of Dumbledore, dropping just enough hints to Hagrid and himself to get him in and out of trouble. Never thought about Lupin coming back to Hogwarts the same year Sirius escaped, was it coincidence? Small wonder Snape had been so suspicious of him.

Harry shook him self and rubbed at his forehead, it was like having worms in his brain, crawling around in side his skull, sparking on nerves and causing flashes of old memories seen through new eyes. "Mumma, mumma, Harry stole my lolli!" "But I didn't!" Harry did his best not to gag on the feeling of Petunia's sharp fingernails in his ear. "C'mon Harry! We can take dad's car!" The engine gave way beneath them just as the whomping willow came crashing down on them. "Harry Potter should use this, Harry Potter will breathe under water!" His Weasley….

"Harry! Harry are you all right?" Hermione was in front of him, waving her hand, trying to look into his pupils, feeling his pulse. Harry forced himself to focus on Hermione's nose, cute and just slightly upturned, forced himself away from Snape's mind. "Is it your scar? Do you need to go see Madam Pomfrey? Are you all right?"

"Uhm… yes." Yes to what? "Potter… I need help." "Right then, clearly you've gone mad." Hermione was staring at him, even Marjorie, who had been bedridden for three days by order of the school nurse, was staring at him with concern. He didn't think he'd been screaming again, had he? "Yes. It's just my scar… I think You-Know-Who is a bit peevish. Girl troubles maybe?" The joke fell a bit flat, but his jokes always seemed to.

"Are… you sure you don't need to see Professor Dumbledore?"

"Ah Mister Potter…" "Absolutely not, no. I think I'll just… go… nap."

As Harry stood up shakily and climbed the stairs to the boy's wing, Marjorie and Hermione shared apprehensive looks from across the table.

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"Well done," Said Peter Petigrew to none other than himself as Severus Snape gulped down brandy five feet away, though it came out more as "Swwee, skct skct squed." "You spend your whole life sucking up to a selfish, megalomaniacal arse, and here you are, once again, trapped like a rat, literally. Peter my lad, if you ever get out of this, it is time for a serious career change." Translating that into rat-language would be by-and-large, pointless.

Hide out in Severus's dungeon, Voldemort had said, so Wormtail had done just that. Learn what you can about Potter, he said, keep an eye on our future brethren, do tell me what Dumbledore is up to these days, and oh yes, try not to get yourself caught and roasted on a spit. He could just see it now, "How's the rat flambé coming Greeble?" "A sight better than the rat-tail tart I'll tell ya that! Who knew you had to use so many raspberries?" "Still, it's the best idea you've ever had, puttin' the cats out-a work."

There was little to report back, something that terrified him, but he carefully made mental copies of documents anyway. Dumbledore was up to his old tricks, allying with the strangest individuals on earth, the Mermaids, the were-folk, the centaurs, the educational board, the list went on. Peter wanted to laugh, no matter how many people Dumbledore rallied around him, he would never have an army that rivaled Voldemort's, and he could never have the control that Voldemort did.

Dumbledore would be defenseless if Voldemort chose to attack now, and Potter had gone mad. Would it be better to lie, after all, no one wants an unworthy adversary. Maybe he could say that Potter was still the semi-heroic figure he had been a year ago, and didn't look like he could be knocked over with a feather. No, under no circumstances could Harry Potter be knocked over with a feather, absolutely not, especially not if that feather was in a wand, no way no how. Oh, who was he trying to kid? He had always been a bad liar anyway.

The young Death Eaters 'in training' were attempting to emulate their elder cousins with astounding accuracy. Trolling the halls, recruiting young lackeys, harassing the Muggle born population, all under the clever guise of being the little shits they were. Peter felt a twang of guilt, having more than once been on the receiving end of a discriminatory curse. Had no one taught these children to use their genetic superiority wisely? A fraction of a chromosome and they all could have been squibs, it was a delicate thing, if some outraged Muggle-born student could easily turn them into a toad, changing them into squibs would be just as simple. Were the Death Eaters going to be reduced to some vacant-minded thugs without a cause or focus in life? When Peter joined he was proud to be part of a cause, helping under appreciated wizards like him escape a life of anonymity and boredom. Now he was just disgusted.

Some misplaced loyalties had been creeping up on him, threatening to uproot what little faith he had left in his Master. Perhaps as a result of feeding him, supporting him, finding new vessels for him, seeing his weak moments, and suffering his powerful ones Peter had just forgotten that Voldemort would one day be a world leader, and was now beginning to realize that he had helped a mental five-year-old achieve power. He was better off with the Weasley's, sleeping on Ron's shoulder and being fed scraps under the table by the little girl. "Peter, you are an idiot. A bloody buffoon, you should be locked up in Mungo's…."

"Ah…" said Severus Snape, still appearing to shuffle papers across his desk, a meaningless activity that he never performed unless very deep in thought, "a rat. Maybe I'll use its liver for an Incantatum Amplifico potion."

If it was possible for an individual to scatter, Wormtail managed it brilliantly.

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The end! …of that chapter. When I get to say "the end" for real I think there will be significantly more than a single exclamation point. Besides, how frustrating, to actually end a story with Peter Petigrew – yuck. (now for a bad rhyme:)

Read, Review, and I'll love you!


	18. Pomp and Circumstances

**Disclaimer: **Harry Potter (novels, movies, franchise, whatever) does not belong to me. Neither of course does Draco Malfoy – but Christmas is always around the corner.

**Author's Notes: **I know I haven't updated in a few months, which is a sad thing really. I am reluctant to admit that this story is actually on hiatus – I have some future chapters written but I'd really like the opportunity to finish it and polish it up a bit before I post the rest of them – so you'll just have to forgive me for dangling chapter 18 in front of you because it's very strange and rather short. Who knows, maybe an overwhelming response of reviews and encouragement will prompt me to work harder. XD

On that note, thanks to the people that reviewed for chapter 17:

**Neverbird: **Thank god for you really, I'm so glad you've stuck around to read this despite that it's slow moving and kinda bizarre. If you like the strange character cameos though you should probably enjoy the first bit of this chapter (Lucius! Hoowah!).

**VampireLouis: **I've read some Anne Rice, I can't say I fell head over heels in love with her, but of course it's been so long I'd have to re-read to give a decent comment. I do love your moniker though, knowing there's a story behind it kinda gives me the warm fuzzies (god knows Rayne-Jelly wasn't what my mummy named me). Anyway – thank you so much for the review, I'm glad you liked the Collin bit, I've always been particularly fond of that too. I know it's jumbled, for some reason every time I try to write something it comes out all twisted and confusing which I hope gives it a human quality but tends to just confuse people. And I'm not big on exhibition, I tend to get all awkward and stupid trying to explain things that don't need to be explained and then not explaining the things that do which is probably more than you ever wanted to know about my writing process, but there it is. XD Anyway, thank you so much and I'm (is this wrong?) glad you're addicted.

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Chapter 18: Pomp and Circumstances.

His shoulders were drawn together in anxious wait; his stomach seethed and churned into his throat, threatening to explode out of him, his heart beat furiously against his rib cage. If he ever debased himself enough to regard the inadequate Muggle vernacular as a legitimate means of communication, Lucius Malfoy would have called himself 'horny'. Where was Narcissa when he needed her? The woman was an absolute cold fish, she was generally no more desirable than the average house elf, and far less useful, but she was still technically his wife, and still technically obligated to perform certain nuptial duties. Ah, quite right, she was stone dead and about time: if her recent behavior had been any indication her body was simply waiting to drop, useless hag.

"Ah father." Draco was leaning against a wall, arrogantly inspecting his nails with the air of someone displeased with a perfect manicure and prepared to demand another for free. He knew it well. "I've been meaning to discuss with you," Draco continued, the room began to spin, slowly at first than steadily faster, though Draco never moved with it. He felt like a ballerina that found her spot and refused to move her eyes from it; he deliberately blinked, "The division of the Malfoy estate."

"What division?" Lucius croaked, leaning against his chiseled bed-post with something less than austere poise. Was there no water in this room? Where was Tilly, if that was the stupid thing's name, with the tea?

"You know how I feel about large and gaudy pieces of property…" happily inclined towards them? Never in his life had Draco Malfoy been subject to anything less than 60 acres, and never in his life would he be, it was a mark of Malfoy pride that the Manor be stretched over 100 acres of land, and still unplottable; because everyone knew that large regions were by their very nature difficult to conceal. "And as I now own the property, I see no reason to maintain a chunk of land that size."

"You own no such thing!" Lucius blinked again, he never would have said something so inane if he wasn't so damned thirsty! He was burning from the inside out, like all the liquid in his cardio-vascular system was simultaneously evaporating, leaving the dried out husk of a twitching man.

"It's in the blood I'm afraid." He really would have to be getting that manicure, he actually had a hangnail. "The vault opened for me, and I currently hold the keys."

"You are my SON by blood! Of course it opened for you! Just as it would open for me!" He was rasping now, the room was arid, Lucius clutched the bed post like it was his only link to life, the only means of keeping him upright. A pin seemed to float before him before gently falling into his outstretched hand, though he could neither remember moving his hand, or summoning a pin.

"Yes," Said his son, "but do you have any left?"

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It was often said of Harry Potter that he was impatient. It was also said that jackalopes prefer thistle to sage. People were best known for their ability to perpetuate the most stupid rumors, and the greatest truths that others of a more individual nature take for granted. The fact is, Harry Potter is impatient, he hates waiting for anyone or anything, he is the type that needs to know now, and if he can't, will never actually bother posing the question. Unfortunately for Harry Potter, some things in life force patience on people like a kindly aunt forcing sweets into a bulging mouth, Harry Potter found himself in this situation and, like most things, was handling it with a marvelous lack of subtlety.

Harry wasn't pacing, or tapping his foot, or doing any of the other things one normally associates with anticipation or impatience, but he may as well have been. Harry was sitting in absolute stillness, he hadn't moved a muscle in well over an hour, futilely hoping that with stillness of body would come stillness of mind; someone coming upon the scene would be hard pressed to see if he were even breathing. He was deeply concerned, anxious, worried even, because Draco Malfoy was over two hours late, which was far from fashionable, even by aristocratic standards.

They were supposed to meet here at midnight, Malfoy was supposed to crawl through the hole in the witches back, grumbling about the general dusty nature of candy store cellars, and they were supposed to argue about the relevancy of deer in modern literature on their way to the nearby library. Instead, he was trying not to twiddle his thumbs nervously, and Malfoy was very distinctly not there, witch's back or not. Harry gave into the urge to chew his lip, a trait he'd picked up from Ginny Weasley during long nights in the Weasley living room when it was too early to retire for bed and there was no where else for her to run. Now of course, Ginny Weasley hardly chewed her lip at all, because she was hardly around Harry, which was both good, and sad as she was the only Weasley left in Hogwarts.

Harry's slid through his increasingly dark imagination and skidded around the corners of reality, why was Malfoy so delayed? Was there a hoe-down at the Death Eater camp that he hadn't been informed of? Had Malfoy been detained by pressing business? Was Harry himself the cause? Was he lying dead in a ditch somewhere? Did Voldemort have him chained up somewhere (very gothic, but his brain just couldn't get around gravestones at midnight and flashes of the occult that the Dark Lord seemed so inclined towards) dying or worse? Harry's lip began to ache, so he moved his focus of nervous frustration to itching one thumb with the other.

What was he supposed to do if Malfoy never showed up? Wait for him in class the following afternoon, run straight to Professor Dumbledore about it? He could just see how that conversation would follow, "Professor, have you heard anything from Malfoy lately?" "Why do you ask Mister Potter?" "Idle curiosity I suppose-" and here Dumbledore would override him because it's just the sort of thing he would do "I don't believe in idle curiosity, every question has a reason, every reason has another… it's a great chain of focus Mister Potter, human nature really. Why do you really ask?" "Well, you see professor; we're actually trying to kill Voldemort. Absurd, I know, but it's always been running away before, I've never tried this route." "With Mister Malfoy?" "Well… it seems that he's the only person that makes my brain run properly these days" Which would lead to a whole new line of very disturbing questioning, because Harry always felt as though a strong dose of veritaserum had been administered to him the moment he stepped through Dumbledore's office door, and he was tempted to spill his entire life onto the floor.

Perhaps sitting inside the passage to Hogsmeade would be wiser, less chance of a late night patrol dropping by, but Harry didn't think he could stand himself alone in the dark enclosed space with nothing but his mind to keep him company. At least here there was the flickering torchlight required of all castles, and the occasionally pattern to be picked out on the limestone witch. What could he really be expected to do if Malfoy never came back? The whole thing would be bunk, wouldn't it? No one would believe Hermione Granger the Death Eater, simply on the principle of the thing, and he doubted very seriously he could get anyone else to take the risk.

Harry's thumb was getting raw, so he switched hands. Would Malfoy weigh as heavily on his mind as Cedric did? There was the inevitable downfall of knowing Malfoy better; six years of hatred can go a long way towards learning about a person, if it was even hatred, more like very stubborn animosity. But Cedric had been a good person; it was practically a requirement of the first sacrifice, a would-be hero, a shining example of moral and civic duty. Draco Malfoy was a crass, self-righteous, arrogant prick, concerned only with appearances and self preservation, which probably wasn't true because true self preservation would have been strict loyalty to Voldemort, but he couldn't keep himself from thinking it. He was saved further speculation on the general nature of Malfoy's character by the arrival of Malfoy himself, practically into his lap, and very much the worse for wear.

"Christ!" Surprised despite his best efforts to the contrary, Malfoy had a horrible way of sneaking up on him when he least expected it, and it was hard to break those old Muggle habits of blaspheming. "Where've you been?"

Malfoy's teeth chattered in response, far from the scathing retort he'd been expecting, possibly something along the lines of "Picking daisies with the good little boys and girls, you should have joined us" from his reluctant accomplice. "Are you—? Stupid question, of course you're not." What that stupid question was he never said, Malfoy was shaking uncontrollably and clearly biting back the urge to vomit all over Harry's sweater, so Harry, not knowing what else to do, slung his cloak around Malfoy's shoulders and got out of range.

An indeterminate amount of time, during which Harry managed to summon his very first cup of tea, even if it was lemon, passed while Malfoy made the effort to get his brain back in working order. Harry watched slowly as first his jaw stopped rattling, then his shoulders stopped shaking, and he even looked as though he'd be able to stand up again within the week, though his carefully practiced tea-cup still rattled in it's saucer, even after Malfoy had drained the last drop. "What the hell happened?"

"I couldn't…" He somehow managed to stutter the syllables out, and started again "He…" stop. Like a telegram, and he tried to start again, this time with marginally more success, "I couldn't get near him… he knew, I don't know how, and I had to tell him something."

"Knew what?" Stop. But even as he asked it, the answer was dawning on him. Somehow Voldemort knew that Harry and Draco were conspiring to something, his painful occlumency lessons, all the research everything he'd been beating his head against for the past month was going to be a waste. Which didn't explain why Draco was alive, Voldemort killed traitors, he couldn't afford to let them run around like Dumbledore did. "What did you tell him?"

Malfoy stumbled over the right words, and then stumbled over his pride as he tried to spit them out. "I managed to convince him," he said very reasonably, in a tone that left no room for argument because arguing with facts was a useless pursuit, "that I'm… trying to… 'turn you' to the sensible side." Which was of course the Death Eater side, and had nothing to do with sense one way or the other.

"Merlin's Darned Socks!" Harry felt the world fall out from under him, when really he'd just sat back to survey the damage. Malfoy's stupid, stupid survival instincts, like a rat, when trapped will start pleading in every language they know how, and they'll risk it all just to get away, so it's probably a good thing that cats can't speak rat, or there would be an outbreak of plague and a lot of starving cats. Harry had unpleasant images of Peter Petigrew.

"Would you prefer that I'd died?" Malfoy was still looking a bit blue, though not emotionally, his skin was quite literally the color blue and Harry was actually gratified to see it. He ignored the occasional tremor that made Malfoy's shoulders shake, and ignored the look of impotence and pain that crossed his face when Harry said what he did. Ignored knowing that the Dark Lord had taken points for initiative, and tried so hard to ignore how pitiful Draco Malfoy looked hunched over an empty teacup. Harry was left feeling not at all gratified at Malfoy's blueness, but very frightened, and very angry.

"Yeah maybe! Do you have any idea what this means for me? If Dumbledore thinks I've gone over I'll be labeled as treasonous and thoughtfully 'detained' to keep me from doing any more damage, and if I manage to escape that, I'll _actually _have to spend the rest of my life pandering to the cracked bastard that killed my parents!" He hadn't felt so upset all year, it was like anger was burning away all the cobwebs in his brain, how hadn't he thought of this? What on earth had he been thinking to trust a Malfoy of all people, how stupid and inconsiderate of him!

"Right! Because Merlin forbid, the great Harry Potter actually put his life on the line for something! Make everyone else die for you, isn't that right? Watch people drop like flies trying to cover your ass as long as it stays covered! You are such an arrogant, selfish, sodding bastard!" They were yelling at each other now, just like they used to, their voices bouncing off the walls and echoing down the corridor until a suit of armor hissed at them to shut up. Malfoy was nearly foaming at the mouth, he couldn't remember a time when he'd been so furious, every inch of his skin was screaming out in pain, and all Potter could think of was himself. He wanted to lash out, black out, cry out, at least do something with all of his sudden hatred towards Potter, and it was hatred, the sort he couldn't ever remember feeling before. "I could have been killed; do you know what I went through to just to get back here? And all you're worried about is a frail old man in a bath robe being upset with you! Well I've got news for you Potter; we were all fucking expecting it anyway!"

It was a slap in the face, like stepping through a ghost, or coming too close to a near-terminal accident involving a helicopter and a broomstick. Harry could almost feel the sting of bracing reality, like sandy wind that you wanted to shut your eyes against. He very suddenly couldn't bring himself to be angry any more, "You were?" and the soft quality of his voice took the wind out of Malfoy's sails too.

"Yes." Malfoy, in his long career of cheating, snide, wormy little bastardism had never actually had the decency to lie outright, as he'd learned from the very best that the truth hurt more. It wouldn't have shocked a soul if Harry had disappeared one night to be found on the front lines of Voldemort's army. It was only natural, the young hero spirals into depression, he dwells on the enemy too long with no moral basis in truth or righteousness, he turns to the dark side, and people say "Oh, if only Obi-wan Kenobi had taught him more." It was a simple formula and a prelude to an obvious reign of idiocy until another gullible young hero was found. Maybe Potter hadn't noticed, but Draco had. Everyone had sensed something slightly off about him, and the stares of adoration and hope had turned to suspicion and despair.

Harry didn't know what to say to that, yes was such a strange little word, it meant so much, and yet said nothing. Yes what? There had to be more, it was a simple law of human nature. Harry really wished he'd said something as distinctly vague as 'sort of'. "You're right." He said carefully, because there was really no other way to say such things in Hogwarts, "So I guess I'm in Voldemort's camp…."

"I'm sorry—"

Harry overrode him, "No." Malfoy wasn't sorry, he hadn't been sorry a day in his life and Harry refused to accept an apology from him anyway. Malfoy looked like he was about to keel over dead, Harry wouldn't let him apologize for his behavior, or his condition, or the circumstances that put him there because it was all Harry's fault anyway. If Malfoy wanted to apologize, he had his pick of anyone but Harry as the Confessor. "You're right." Malfoy's mouth snapped shut, "You're right. I've been…" His voice cracked over his tongue, he'd been a right bastard.

Harry stopped and stared at the floor desperately hoping it would swallow him up and spit him out in Bulgaria, and the anger returned. "I don't know what to do. So I do nothing until suddenly it drops in my lap, and someone besides me gets hurt because of me. Even you… and now I've got no room to—"

"Shut up Potter," Harry's back hit the floor with a 'whump' sound. This meeting in secrecy, the panic of being discovered with a death eater, it was all a bit of an embarrassing relief not to have to continue the secretive idiocy. If Harry still had friends, he knew they'd wonder what was wrong with him, and if it made their association more believable then he would do anything to kill Voldemort. For a brief moment he thought that Malfoy had hit him, but as he stared up at the ceiling he realized that what he'd done was quite the opposite.

A hand buried in his hair, firm weight holding him against the ground, warm breath against his face, Malfoy's mouth forcefully silencing his own with soft and foreign lips, cradling his own as a soft tongue snaked out to beg entrance. "What the hell are you doing?" Harry was afraid of the answer.

"It's obvious isn't it?"

"Yes… but why are you doing it?"

"Did you want me to stop?" No. Yes. Something found itself in Harry that may have been there before, lurking and deeply suppressed beneath the surface of consciousness, awaiting its ever-slim chance to be noticed and denied for fear of exploration. The absolute _weight _of Malfoy bearing him to the ground, all elbows, and knees, and sharp angles. Harry wanted to lose himself, wanted to disappear, to think: Malfoy wasn't letting him. No. Yes.

Malfoy was unbearably smug, but comfortably warm, he was the rudest wizard imaginable, but also the only one that was willing to be rude; Harry was losing his mind. "If I say yes, would you?"

"...no."

"Then yes," It was such a strange little word.

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In case you missed it, that was the long awaited first kiss. tbc. 


	19. Affection

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**Disclaimer:** Harry Potter does not belong to me - in fact, I wouldn't want it to belong to me, aside from the abhorent sums of money that JKR makes off of each best-seller there's the pressure behind the writing and frankly... I'm not that cutesy. Nope - Not mine, sorry, look elsewhere.

**Author's Notes:** I've decided that Twasits is more or less done (I've got several more chapters lined up so relax, it doesn't end here) – I've got all the framework laid out, I just have to WRITE it… which is of course the hard part, but for some reason I've been reinspired to write it. So hopefully it will be done within the week, or at least by October first (which will be nice because it's been nearly four fucking years). I will not, however, be posting another chapter until I've completed the story itself, so wish me luck and give me lots of encouragement (it helps).

Just so you know (I realize we haven't quite gotten there yet because I'm awkward about writing it) this story is simultaneously being posted on my LJ account (That would be Malf0yunderscoreM0nkeys, very easy to find) and anything that's been cropped out for censorship reasons can be read there. Right – anyway. Onward ho with the chapter, and hopefully I'll finish and post again some time before Christmas .

**Thanks: **

**The Boy: **Yes – slowly the plot builds. It's a miracle really. You're right – my characters do think too much – it's something I can't really help so I coined a word to describe that tired dizzy feeling you get while reading them – Twasits XD. Yeah I know, it's bad. Hopefully some of the later chapters won't be quite so bad – for some reason it's hard to make Harry go introspective when Draco's around.

**Neverbird: **Here's hoping you haven't lost patience with me! Your reviews are always so encouraging I wish I could bake you cookies or something to show thanks (I do a mean chocolate chip). I'm so… I dunno, happy that you think I put so much thought into these things, I really don't and I'm glad things appear to be well crafted because I'm often too long winded for my own good. Believe me, if I did half the thinking my characters do…. XD. But anyway, thank you SO much for reading through this whole thing, I feel like you're as much of the process as the caffeine and the banging my head into a wall.

**VampireLouis:** Yes! I am SO glad you got that – I mean, really got that. I was so worried that people wouldn't think it was spectacular enough after eighteen chapters of horrible buildup to have a second-party tackle kiss. Actually – your review sent me into a bit of a panic, I was thinking "OH MY GOD! HOW ARE PEOPLE GONNA REACT, WHAT ARE DRACO AND HARRY GONNA DO!" yeah – I do a spectacular panic. Ever seen a chicken with its head cut off? Mine's like that, only less spurty. It's just, I tend to write my chapters MONTHS in advance of when I actually post them (I like to have the whole story finished first, that's not happening with twasits) and whenever someone brings something up that I'd neglected I freak. With any luck you'll like the results. If not – well… sorry?

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Chapter 19 - Affection 

Minerva McGonagall stared with aching eyes at the blank scroll in front of her. Decisions were waiting to be made, names waited to be listed, positions waited to be filled, and it was her responsibility to send eager young witches and wizards to their graves.

The new ledger before her contained the names of all the Order Members, and those best suited as ambassadors to the various tribal cultures across England. One to the elves, one to the centaurs, one to the merfolk, one to the goblins, one to the dwarves, a hundred good-will ambassadors would be clamoring for their assistance, please sir come fight our battles in exchange for… something nice we're sure. I don't suppose a first class Merlin award would mean much?

Albus could rot for assigning her such a hellish post. Minerva would have been more than happy to spend the rest of her life behind a white picket fence, raising her children, completely ignorant of the world around her. She'd achieved the opposite. When she had been very young, no older than twenty five, a young man by the name of Bertram Lewis proposed to her at the start of a Quidditch game, and went off to play the best game of his life. Four months later the infamous Leeds' Lightning chaser played for England in the World Cup in Glazov, Russia, and forgot all about Minerva McGonagall, who spent the rest of her life wondering what life might have been like had he come back. Whether Bertram ran off with a beautiful, young, and mysterious fan, or whether he'd been struck by lightning she didn't know, and didn't particularly care.

Instead of distanced from her imagined son in her old age, she was surrounded by the various offspring that were otherwise unavailable to her. Many of the names on this ledger were the very same she'd called in years passed, Miss Caldwell if you'll be so kind as to attend. Elizabeth Caldwell, now Elizabeth McDermont, she was a willow of a woman, rail thin with hair as light as the driven snow; would it be right to send her to the elves? Would they accept her more readily, or would they be suspicious of the human ambassador because of her natural fey qualities. Perhaps it would be wiser to send her to the Veela's, though it may be better to send a woman that was unattached; Veela's could be ruthlessly territorial.

Who could she possibly send to the Vampires? Dumbledore was an idiot for attempting peace negotiations with vampires when clearly Voldemort could offer them so much more; necks to snap and power to be coveted. She was ready to give up the whole thing, but found she couldn't because despite the seeming calm, everyone could smell a war coming. If there were any way around this she would have leapt on it, but if Voldemort was collecting allies, the Order had no choice but to do the same.

She often wondered when it would start. Would they all suddenly wake up one morning with a Death Eater contingency outside of Hogwarts threatening to tear the building down stone by stone unless they surrendered? That would be his first move; he'd try to take Hogwarts first, it would be his fortress and base of operations, then the ministry would fall. Securing those two positions would give him all of Great Britain; if he got his hands on the Ministry then everything would be lost. Every file on every registered Witch and Wizard was kept there, magical signatures, names, birthdates, every piece of valuable information was kept there, and every good wizard knew that information was power. If any witch or wizard chose to resist then Voldemort could find them and kill them from a distance on a name-thread and a magical signature that was stored in the juvenile records department, it made her sick to think about.

If Voldemort managed to take the Ministry, then Gringotts would be next, the Dark Lord would have the funding to proceed into mainland Europe, he could probably buy off some countries, and conquer the others, which was why she needed an excellent ambassador to the Goblins. The Goblins had been their own people after the revolution, but if they were on good terms with the appropriate human-factions, it would make it that much more difficult for Voldemort to get into Gringotts.

Jacob Crantz would probably be best suited for the job, she wrote a little G next to his name on the ledger. He was level-headed, polite, always a decent student of economics: if anyone could get through to the goblins it would be Jacob.

McGonagall heaved a sigh, she had one name, one position filled, now she only had twenty-two more to go. It was like a giant jig-saw puzzle, matching one piece to another and placing them together. The more pieces she matched, the simpler it was to complete the puzzle. Do the corners first, the Goblins, the Merfolk, the Elves, and the Dwarves. Then place the edges, centaurs, gnomes, gargoyles, veelas, and leprechauns. And finally the center, where more and more pieces were so difficult to define and match, vampires, acromantulas, werewolves, banshees, harpies, trolls, ogres, even humans. The McDermont's could go to the elves, Briar Reece she could send to the ogres because she wasn't entirely convinced he wasn't part ogre himself, and very slowly the pieces came together until she was saying secret goodbyes to Margaret Sanders and praying that Basil Hyde's good looks would see him through his assignment.

Silently, Minerva McGonagall wiped off her quill and washed her hands. She shut the ledger and set it carefully in the center of her desk, pulled back the sheets of her bed, slid into a night gown, pulled the pins out of her hat, and let herself cry.

* * *

Someone was cackling with anticipation, someone else was screaming – Harry could see neither of them. In the background, he could hear "I know you: I walked with you once upon a dream. I know you: the gleam in your eyes is so familiar a gleam…" on a dusty record. Draco Malfoy was using Professor Quirrel's old turban as a foot stool as he juggled something between his fingers that leaked black tar all over them, "It's life." He said authoritatively, and continued to juggle. 

The screaming continued, dull and monotonous against the blaring music, like white noise from a TV that cut over a conversation. Now that he knew where Draco was, where was he? "But if I know you, I know what you'll do…" "Malfoy, what's…?" The turban rotated beneath his boots, Quirrel's mousey brown eyes stared out at him furiously, rolling wildly in burnt and blackened sockets. His face was raw, red, cracked, blistered, peeling, bleeding in places where his mouth opened to emit the most horrible wailing that no one could hear.

Harry jerked awake and barely kept himself from falling. The whole class turned around to stare with apathetic eyes and the occasional cautious giggle rose from the back of the room. "So—" he got two letters into the word before a blinding pain that he hadn't felt all year hit him between the eyes like a shovel, huge and bursting through his brain before he could even think to defend himself and he really did fall out of his chair clutching at his forehead. Professor Blirghty scrambled around his desk with cries of "Mister Potter!" knocking piles of un-graded scrolls and parchment askew with his over-large sleeves as he went. "Mister Potter! Mister Potter! Are you all right?"

No. No he really wasn't all right: it was a ridiculous little question from a ridiculous little man, the familiar folds of his book bag crumpled into his hand as he lurched to his feet and towards the door, catching himself on desks as he went. "I… yes, I… I think I'll just go." Somewhere, anywhere, Harry needed get out of the stuffy over-crowded room, needed to go throw up somewhere, or blow his brains out, or pass out. He made it about ten feet from the door before he was abruptly sitting down again.

"That's what I like to see!" He heard, carried across the hall in the squeaky little boom of the newly appointed DADA teacher, "Inter-house cooperation. Why I remember as a Ravenclaw…" interspersed by Hermione's indignant sputtering.

Malfoy was directly behind him, his prowess for being excused from lectures was legendary, and Blirghty was relatively new to this game; he hadn't stood a chance. What had his excuse been this time, "You know Professor, I'm not feeling very well either." Or "If you don't mind professor, I'll go help him to the infirmary."

"Potter?"

"No." Voldemort was furious, narrow eyed, pursed lipped, flared nostril, white knuckled furious. Harry's head felt full of red-hot magma, his brain was burning to a crisp and pouring out his ears.

"What's going on?" Someone had done something stupid: that was the long and short of it. Voldemort was frustrated, he was angry, he was furious with himself for delegating to a bunch of imbeciles. The whole world was a big ball, infested with the most unintelligent species ever to have known the universe. Harry felt the spiteful malice of Voldemort's ire rolling over him like an oil-slick, he couldn't get his feet under him, and the litany was crushing his skull. It was a long moment before Voldemort got his emotions under control and Harry regained the cool solidity of his own mind, but it finally happened and Harry opened his eyes. "If you don't tell me what's going on right now, I swear by Merlin I'll turn you into a toad and give you to the house elves for frog flambé."

"Shut up Malfoy." Harry said reflexively, something important had just flittered across his brain, and he was trying to catch up to it before it was gone permanently. Something to do with that silly little day dream and Professor Quirrel. "I think I just thought of something."

"Well that's good to know. What happens when you have an epiphany? Does your head explode? I'd hate to see you make a decision, does your brain leak out of your nostrils and do a tap dance?"

Harry watched with amusement as Malfoy caught his breath and smoothed down his ruffled feathers, had he been pacing? There was something important right behind his eyes, like an itch he couldn't quite scratch, or a color that you'd been staring at for so long you'd forgotten what it looks like and all you can see is the opposite version. "I'm happy to see you're so worried," he said distractedly, and continued staring at the far wall.

"Ah yes, I'm just bursting with concern I'm sure." Harry laughed dully and rested his head against the cool wall, listening to the soft melee of rustling paper and groaning students as they entered the last leg of the period.

Malfoy riffled around in the bottomless arena of his book bag and emerged with a slightly squashed chocolate frog that he'd confiscated off a cheeky first year a week ago. The little blighter had dared imply that Malfoy was something other than the god he appeared to be; it was now his duty to prove the little toadstool wrong. A vendetta against a first year may have been petty and more than a little pathetic, but it occasionally scored him free candy so no one was complaining. Well, no one but the first year. "Here." He said, and pressed the chocolate into Harry's palm, "eat this, it should make you feel better."

Harry's pout could have rivaled a discontented five year old's. "I hate chocolate," which didn't used to be true, but every time he ate chocolate it was because of a headache, or because his scar decided to go terminal, or because dementors just happened to stop the train.

"Yes well, I hate daffodils. Now eat that so we can move." Harry unwrapped the weakly struggling confection, and pocketed the card beneath it before popping it in his mouth. Harry always winced as the frog's final 'ribbit' followed the squirming confectionary down his throat, but it did make him feel better, and soon after Malfoy hauled him up he was able to get his feet in working order again.

Harry vetoed the library with a complaint of 'because Hermione might be there!' which was immediately followed by some nasty little comments on Malfoy's part about bibliophilic brown-nosers; so they careened left down an obscure corridor on the first floor and unknowingly towards Hufflepuff territory and through a door that neither boy had been through before. The small unobtrusive door opened out to a disused courtyard, it was long ago a garden where many a rudimentary herbology lecture had been carried out – it was now a forgotten corner that didn't get weeded, the high walls of the castle around it were thick with growth and the sweet stench of molding plant life.

"It's damp," he said after a moment of woeful observation. Damp, was in fact, an understatement of epic proportions: it was raining. It hadn't rained in months, or if it had, Harry hadn't known it – he couldn't really remember the last time he'd been outside, even compulsory outdoor classes were canceled due to suspicious Death Eater movement, and the whole student body was suffering from cabin fever and dementia. Students were hanging together in twos and threes, laughing and smiling, pulling pranks on one another, completely oblivious to the world around them. There was no other explanation; the entire student body of Hogwarts had lost its collective mind: anything could happen and they kept on laughing. "How long has it been raining?"

Draco Malfoy knew a stupid question when he heard one, it was the beginning of spring on an island where morning fog rolled in like tsunami's and it drizzled all afternoon, but he answered anyway, because it didn't often rain like this, "Days."

"Oh." Harry put forth a hand and a fat drop of water hit the middle of his hand with stinging force, gravity had a vendetta against this water, and the rain was pounding against the earth in defiance of its source. Harry stepped out into it and relished the icy cold of thick droplets hitting his head and shoulders. Dumbledore would attack first. Apropos of nothing, Dumbledore would attack first, and Voldemort would meet him with crushing force. Voldemort had everything to his advantage, he had the better informants, he had the larger force, he had the motivation to conquer—he had no inhibitions. Harry could see great volleys of green light come arching through the high windows of Castle Hogwarts, he could see students cowering in the bathrooms as giants, vampires, and death eaters alike crowded into the halls of the venerable school, killing without prejudice.

The memorial in the trophy room would be a pittance; it would mock him until he was found cowering like a rat, to be dragged out and killed publicly. Dumbledore would die. He was formidable, he would be the last bastion, but everything around him would crumble under green lighting as the screams of his colleagues rang out around him, because there would be no defense. Good wizards had no defenses against true power, their weaknesses made them pious, but no amount of piety would save their lives—the afterlife wasn't his concern.

The glassy eyed emptiness of fresh corpses stared out at him from every angle, every one of them someone he knew, and yet completely other than anyone he recognized. He jolted almost painfully as Malfoy laid a hand on his shoulder, and opened his eyes. "Harry, are you…" the dead bodies had vanished into runny glasses and a warped pale face, death cries had been reduced to hard rain on abused foliage, no, he really wasn't all right. He was cold, and scared, and confused.

"Malfoy… I…" He moved closer, much closer, because Malfoy's arm on his shoulder was the only heat. "Can we…" he started, there was so much to say, so much time to say it in, and such a waste to say it. He could feel Malfoy as he edged closer, he felt the cloud of warmth that he was generating, felt his quiet breathing as it ricocheted off his own. Malfoy was no longer a clear picture of a young man; he was just a blur, a pale gold blot, a smear. "I'm sorry," he said hoarsely, and stepped back into the cold.

There was an ancient bench that jutted from the wall like an unsightly growth, Harry avoided it. He tried to walk, but there was no where to go. It was enough of a path to fit twenty students, it was over grown and drowning: it was just four solid walls with barely enough space for air between them, so he settled for crossing his arms over his chest and trying not to think. Like a prison cell, if he looked up, there would be the parapets of stone, the very peak of the Ravenclaw Tower maybe, and an empty square of grey sky. A claustrophobic person would feel trapped in this little place; Harry was just tired and restless, pacing in his cage.

It would have been so much easier just to let things happen, so much easier just to let them take their course. All his life he'd been struggling to get away from the path laid out for him, old clothes dyed grey, chutes into dizzying antechambers, mazes with only one true outcome, all his life he'd been trying to be rid of being Harry Potter, and now that he had no lighted path to obliviously stumble down, he desperately wanted one. Welcome to adulthood, said one rebellious corner of his brain, it was beaten to a pulp by the other ninety percent, the child that needed to be recognized.

"Potter," said the voice behind him, because Draco was there too, getting drenched in the afternoon rain, though he didn't exactly know why. Harry could hear the questions, he could hear the apprehension, the quiet panic, and the tired resignation in his voice. Every time Draco said 'potter' he seemed to be asking a thousand and three things of him, are you up for this, can we do this, is this really something you're going to give your life for, "Can't we just skip the preamble?"

Harry turned around and Draco was there. He blinked and Draco was there as a sort of melted blob through his dripping glasses, soaking wet, shivering, staring. He leaned closer, Harry leaned closer, their toes shuffled nearer one another, their lips met in hazy recollection of having done this before. Malfoy's hands found Harry's waist and firmly wrapped around it pulling him closer still as they both shivered. Harry let his eyes slide closed, he let sound drown him as Draco's tongue caressed his lips and found his teeth open.

Was Malfoy going to double cross him, lead him to Voldemort like a lost little lamb to the slaughter? Could everything up to this point have been an elaborate ruse? Death Eaters did not understand subtlety, like a fraternity of drunken college students, as a body they could not comprehend espionage, or disobedience: was Voldemort equally oblivious? Could his idiocy be relied upon? Did any of it really matter? Ron was betrayed, but not around to be betrayed. He had to do this, it was the only way to accomplish his goals – it did not matter that Malfoy was a death eater and that they were using each other because he could no longer sit idly by while the world buzzed and hummed around him like a wasps' nest.

Warmth was flooding him, gripping him by the shoulders and wrapping around him like a fleece blanket on a cold afternoon. He hadn't been warm since before Ron died, he was guilty for being warm now; he was shutting off his brain and everything associated with it. He was promptly losing himself. Harry's fingers found Malfoy's neck and hair, Malfoy's lips found the soft spot just below his ear, and he sighed.

* * *

Peter Petigrew was beginning to panic. His master had called him away from his assignment, demanding a report about Dumbledore's current activities, he had nothing. Dumbledore was guarding his plans far too carefully for the likes of Peter's eyes, if he had any at all they were locked securely inside his head. About Harry Potter, however, he had enough incriminating evidence to pin Mary Kelly's murder on him. 

He had seen Harry. He saw him one night in the library where Peter had been hiding between bookshelves, with his head on the table mumbling something incoherent as Draco Malfoy absentmindedly rubbed his exposed neck and poured through a potions text.

He had seen Harry Potter before of course: his heart had nearly stopped that first time on the train, when a small and sickly version of James had towered over him. And in the years since, he'd seen the whole world, and Harry Potter from a number of angles; Peter saw him at Quidditch when Ron absentmindedly carried him out to the pitch, he'd seen him unconscious in the hospital wing, fighting off the urge to spit at Snivvelus, dead tired after detention, excited, frustrated, in pain, he'd seen every expression that it was possible for a rat to see. But he'd never seen Harry Potter like this before. He was stick thin, and pale, and though Wormtail couldn't see his face, he could guess it was as sunken and tired as the rest of him.

Malfoy was expected to get close to Potter, not this close perhaps, but by whatever means necessary he was to convert him. Wormtail had scrabbled closer to the pair, and sat flush against the table leg, praying he wouldn't be noticed each time an ankle twitched beside him. "What about this one?" Potter had said, and Malfoy answered: "No… that one needs to be injected or go straight into the bloodline. We're looking for something that can be ingested, or simply transferred on." His ears had pricked forward, his curiosity fully piqued, "Why can't we kill the bastard the normal way?" Malfoy sighed, "Because you've tried it before remember? Your wand is useless against him." And Peter froze; he had all he needed.

Never in all his time as a rat, however, had he seen anything so sad as his best friend, gaunt and sickly. Only it wasn't James, because he was dead, and it wasn't Sirius, because he was lost, and it wasn't Remus, because he'd probably been killed in the werewolf raid: it was Harry, who had never done anything to him, and to whom he owed his life. It was Harry who looked as though he were dying unlike his friends who had made the transition from alive to dead in rapid time.

There were many things in Peter's life that he could not forgive himself for. Dropping in on that conversation would be yet another, he would never forgive himself for hearing that, never forgive himself for his inability to lie. "WORMTAIL!" He flinched violently, and scurried into the next room as he might have done as a rat. Because he had to tell his master everything.

* * *

DUN DUN DUN! Foreshadowing, and evil people, oh my! Hopefully that kiss was better than the first one (I agree, everyone needs some sap now and again, and it doesn't happen often in this story). Reviews will earn you cookies, and possibly more chapters. XD 

Thanks for reading!


	20. The Beginning

**Disclaimer: **Harry Potter does not belong to me, in no way do I lay claim to Harry Potter – the long and short of it is folks – there'd be no legal ground suing me because I'm not delusional enough to think that I'm a British multi-millionaire.

**Author's Notes: **Holy Jeez! I finally finished it! It is indeed the season of Christmas miracles, for I have finished Twasits (officially - the writing, the reading, the editing,) I'm done. I'm going to post the thing and wash my hands of it. Which means the posts should be flying in thick and fast now. I had wanted to finish the story before Christmas so I could reintroduce it online - but I was beginning to doubt I'd ever get there.  
Hey - I can admit it, Twasits is REALLY hard to sit through. I am now, however, completely caught up to my account on Livejournal, which I find exciting. Speaking of LiveJournal – you can find the entire, re-edited, uncut archive (this will include some NC-17 scenes in later chapters) at Malf0yM0nkeys. Come visit, if you give me feedback, I will give you cyber hugs.

And so finally I give you what you've all been waiting for (or probably not, I've probably been forgotten about) in the reemergence of Twasits:

* * *

CHAPTER 20 The Beginning

Harry braced himself for the attack, they had been coming at irregular intervals since that first unwarranted jaunt into Snape's mind at the first of the month; since Snape declared him competent enough, he was never safe from the potion's master's legilimency. In the Great Hall he accidentally caught Snape's eye and found himself unwittingly living through an afternoon in Number 12 Grimmauld Place when Sirius had ruffled his hair and practically danced around a box of tree ornaments before Harry shut the memory off. During potions when brewing the nastily complex doxycide that Mrs. Weasley was so fond of he found himself elbow deep in rotting linguini after Dudley tipped him into a dumpster on the way home from primary, and he sloshed his potion down his robes before he could close his mind to Snape's intrusion. His protective robes and shoes dissolved into thick grey goo that leaked down his trousers and on to the floor, after enduring an entire afternoon smelling of bundimun secretion he had learned to practice Occlumency subconsciously and Snape's legilimen barbs slid around his consciousness like water drops on a hot stove.

Harry could feel it even now as he stared at his Potions professor across the empty classroom they were using for his 'remedial' lessons. He had no interest in seeing Snape's thoughts, or feeling the disgusting residue they always left behind so he kept his mind to himself and pointedly did not pursue the thread of magic that was jabbing for his memories. Occlumency was a cold thing, it wasn't about protecting your thoughts, hiding them behind a wall, keeping an inventory of the things that were, and the things that were not available for thought. A legilimens could break those walls, a more subtle user could replace your memories with his own, could steal the thoughts you didn't know you had – Occlumency was about being cold. Having no thoughts to be stolen, having nothing to protect, closing your mind off by opening it up completely, until the only ideas and memories were the present and the world quite literally flowed from one ear to the other – an Occlumens defended himself by giving the Legilimens nothing but the world at large, until they too could only see the present, and what was physical.

"Mister Potter," was the final declaration, Harry followed that point of magic around his own blank mind, there was Snape, there was an empty cauldron, there on the shelf were pickled gnats, Harry saw his own mind as the classroom and felt a surge of triumph that did not reach Snape's magic because it was not there. There was always that sick rush of fear, a moment of blind panic that no focus could conceal that demanded notice, Harry could feel his mind freeze in place and he wondered always when Snape was going to ask him what the hell he was up to, or demand answers for his apparent treachery because Harry knew he didn't stand a chance if Snape found out, because Dumbledore would know, and he spent so much time thinking of Zoo animals and complete nothingness for Snape's benefit that he was almost baying at the moon. But the good professor had said nothing to date, and would continue to say nothing. "I am sick of your presence in my classroom and I see no reason to continue your lessons."

Harry blinked at the apparent non-sequitur and wondered briefly if he was hallucinating. Always before it was 'Mister Potter you're not trying hard enough' 'Mister Potter, as fascinating as African Elephants are I do not want to see them' 'Mister Potter I realize mental exercises are challenging but do try to focus.' and now it was apparently 'No more lessons.' Harry had asked for this, he was willing to take the abuse and had on several occasions felt that his earwax was going to melt with the force of Snape's verbal harassment. He had requested this and there was no reason beyond the lie of the Headmaster's demand that kept Snape at his lessons. Had he failed? Had he revealed something, or was this another test of blankness? "Am I that hopeless?"

"Frankly Mister Potter, you have been successfully blocking my legilimens for weeks, if you'd given half as much effort to this last year, your godfather may well be alive." That stung, it twisted around in Harry's stomach because he'd given ample thought to the notion, countering it with 'if Snape weren't such a slimy git' and 'how was I to know', but the barbs of doubt stuck under his skin, dug into his brain and weighed him down with responsibility and depression because he knew it was his fault. Snape had always made the effort to make him feel miniscule and imbecilic because of some pathetic personal vendetta and the urge to make Harry into his father, perhaps more so than anyone, and he succeeded more often than he could ever know – Harry kept his mind blank and noted with fanatical devotion the wrinkles on Snape's forehead. The magic slid away from him again, greasy and all consuming in its effort to see his thoughts however mundane, and Harry felt the stab of disgust in the shriveled string of night peppers. "I'll inform the Headmaster of your progress."

"Thank you sir." It was the only thing he could say, and somewhere in the universe he could hear Sirius cursing his name.

* * *

"Yesterday evening at approximately 5:45pm the bodies of Vernon and Petunia Dursley were found in their home in Little Whinging, Surrey. It was their neighbor, Miss Arabella Figg (52), who spotted the Dark Mark hovering above the house, and immediately reported it to the authorities. When Aurors Murphy and Shacklebolt arrived at the scene they discovered the two adult victims lying dead in the kitchen with no mark of forced entry or a struggle. It is highly suspect that the killing curse was used without warning to kill the muggles.

There was neither any sign of magic, nor any magical artifacts in the quaint suburban home, leading authorities to wonder about the motive for attack. Though the Department of Under-Aged Magic had been called to the address twice before, further information concerning the Dursley residence is now strictly classified pending an investigation, as is all other information pertaining to the family. When questioned about the significance of the Dursleys, Auror Shacklebolt (45) stated, "None of your ruddy business."

The Dursleys are survived by their only son Dudley (16), who, because of his status as a minor, has been made a ward of the muggle state and is under heavy surveillance by magical law enforcement.

* * *

It was past midnight. Harry had been riffling through his chest, looking for that last elusive pair of socks that he knew he had and always cropped up when he absolutely did not need them. It went without saying that when he needed them most they were nowhere to be found, and would mysteriously appear next Thursday near the bedstead.

The Gryffindor boy's dorm was icy. Someone, probably him, had left the West Window open and over night a cold wind had blown in bringing with it cloud-cover that refused to budge. It was ridiculous and a bit sad to have been longing for a pair of Vernon's old socks, but Harry's head was an unwilling participant in his life and so his feet were left to do the thinking. It didn't occur to him, or he didn't bother with the thought that his uncle Vernon's socks were his last memento of the man, and as far as mementos went it was nothing spectacular. He had read the morning paper with the rest of Gryffindor, Hermione had shot him a furious look from across the table, anticipating a reaction – anything but how he behaved towards Ron's death, and Cho's. Harry left the table, vomited the meager contents of his stomach into the privy, and didn't leave his room for the rest of the day. Hide for a week, that's what Malfoy had said – and maybe if enough people died because of him he'd never have to move.

Harry carefully unstuck an old folder full of creased parchment, wondering who'd spilled a butter beer on the bottom of his trunk (probably him again) and spent twenty minutes idly flipping through it. More of Ron's lost homework, a pretty decent doodle of Snape as a greasy dog labeled 'The Great Git' and nearly a dozen feet of Hermione's tightly packed scrawl that read like an extra-credit assignment.

"Created in 1330 by the famous Nicholas Flammel, the Philosopher's Stone, also known as the Fruit of Life, has been the major goal of Alchemy from B.C. 270 to A.D. 1750. Though there is no record of Flammel's experiments, Natural Scientists and Alchemists believe it can be recreated. However, modern innovations to the magical field have failed to reproduce the stone, and specialist Gwendolyn Bean, 57, reports in an excerpt from Alchemy through the Ages 'It is now widely suspected that the stone may never be reproduced on earth. Experimentation through alternate dimensions seem promising, but the effects of the Elixir are at this time unstable.'

"The Philosopher's Stone is credited with the gift of life and miraculous healing powers. Other lesser-known attributes include the ability to produce precious metals or gems from lead by immersing the lead in the 'Elixir of Life' with a small piece of the base metal to be transmuted…"

The essay continued, listing various attributes of the stone, and the including sources and a cross reference section but Harry read no further. Now he sat, surrounded by old memorabilia, chocolate frog wrappers, old sweaters, Ron's long-lost Transfigurations essays – all of those things that accumulate over time with no use whatsoever. Harry had probably kept them because he was too lazy to throw them away, or 'because he might need them later.' Once again, it was Hermione's incredible mind to the rescue; Harry had the information all along. "Shit."

Seamus was snoring uproariously, his hacksaw nasal symphony occasionally punctuated by Dean's muffled snorting and Neville's stunted murmurs. Harry clicked off his bedside lamp and swung himself out of bed: Seamus and Dean could sleep through anything. The floor was frigid, but he did his best to be quiet as he slipped out of the room, Hermione's scroll in hand. Neville snorted and rolled over in his bed, muttering something about sour milk, and Harry gently shut the door behind him.

He was discovered later emerging from the kitchens in the ghostly pre-light of dawn, "I couldn't sleep," blurted Malfoy as he rounded the corner. Harry shrugged as if to say 'I never can' and they fell into step together. Harry had been so stupid, so incredibly single-minded. They had been working so hard, endlessly researching, spending every waking moment in the library – even now they were subconsciously shuffling towards the stacks of reference manuals and informative essays. Even Hermione would have been proud of Malfoy's thoroughness, but she had been distracted lately, and Harry couldn't blame her.

When he wasn't pouring over spells, Harry was having feverish nightmares about the end of the world. Standing alone at the foot of a hill as a walking corpse surrounded by those less-animated. It was wrong to be so obsessed with a murder, but all Harry felt was vindicated at last. Theirs was an almost desperate catalogue of poisons and their antidotes. Each poison absolutely deadly, and each poison absolutely impossible to use against the Dark Lord without a miracle. Harry thought he'd found his miracle.

"You smell like oranges." Said Malfoy after a lengthy silence of adjusting himself to Harry's company. It was strange, he would be perfectly comfortable addressing the Minister of Magic in his bathrobe, but something in Potter's eyes made him wish he were wearing more than striped pajamas – perhaps chain mail, because it was hard, and piercing, and completely skeptical about the orange. It made Malfoy nervous, that stare, because Harry could be looking right through him and seeing anything. "Found anything?"

Harry winced. He had searched assuming that Draco, like himself, would be awake and wandering at two a.m. – he had not been so Harry retreated to the kitchens and indulged himself in pained conversation with Dobby for an hour. He had not gone beyond Hermione's scroll for information, he hadn't thought it was necessary. "I may have." He said hesitantly, if Trelawney had really meant the Stone, then everything was over wasn't it? Dumbledore had destroyed it, whatever else Harry's views on the Headmaster were, he could be relied on to keep his word. They walked slowly, shuffling their feet across the pitted flagstones as the sun began to creep over the horizon; Harry couldn't help feeling uncomfortably full and guilty. They had found poisons that was undetectable, but had no way to administer it. They had unearthed lotions and powders that transmitted deadly fumes and chemicals with just a touch, and no way to conceal them. Just when they thought they'd found a possible solution it turned out to be impossible because of locational circumstance or some equally mundane feature of the component spell – now that Harry had a viable answer… he found it was once again out of reach and their last hope. "I don't suppose… is it possible to have a prophecy of something that's already happened?"

Malfoy frowned, staring into the distance. "They're called echoes. Well, sort of. Mediums process a lot of… metaphysical backwash you might call it. Ghosts, and memories of all sorts of psychological impressions." Harry's sense of apprehension and idiocy vanished to be replaced by embarrassed awe at Malfoy's impromptu lecture. Whether he was willing to admit it or not, Malfoy was a damned good student, and Harry was frustrated at his own ignorance. "Memories, strong ambitions, even silent ghosts that are too old to be fully manifest… nintey-five percent of being a medium is being able to tell the difference between the past and the future – they're rubbish. Why?"

Harry squirmed. How could he possibly tell Malfoy that what Voldemort wanted was utterly inaccessible? Especially after the effort they'd gone to, researching, hoping, flipping through page after page of the old spellings and dizzying sentences. After the hope. And that's what it really was, hope that eventually there would be something, a minor key that would solve all the world's problems including their own, and everyone would be around for Christmas dinner. Hope or desperation, or delirium had kept them going and if the Philosopher's stone was their only chance, which it was, then it had all been a waste. "Just… a thought. How d'y –"

"My aunt Gertrude." Malfoy overrode him. "She had the east wing of the Manor until she finally kicked the bucket. She couldn't tell what year she lived in, but she was a powerful Medium."

"Gertrude Malfoy?"

Malfoy winced and pretended he hadn't, whatever his personal disagreements with 'Draco' may be, at least it wasn't as bad as Gertrude – Gerty. "She married in."

Harry dropped it, he didn't really care, he was just trying to avoid the inevitable. He'd once had neighbors named Gertrude and Reginald Jones, but they only stayed at number 7 Privet Drive for a year before Mrs. Figg moved in. "I was just thinking… if Trelawney…" What had he been thinking exactly? That Trelawney had choked on an echo? Or that they're entire reference point was moot because the prophecy was worthless and they had to start from scratch?

"Impossible. Echoes could never… do that to a person, they've already happened. They're like… walking through a ghost, it gives you the willies but it can't steal your _soul_." Harry felt a sudden wash of loathing towards Vernon and Petunia Dursley: they'd kept him clothed and fed with a roof over his head, he was grateful, and furious for his imposed nescience, but it was the important things they had neglected. Whether or not motorcycles could really fly, what happened to his parents, what happened to the body of a divine medium during a prophecy – Harry could make pudding, Malfoy apparently knew all the secrets of wizardom. He hated them, because he should have known these things, and if Hermione was looking for a reaction towards their deaths, that was the only one she would ever get. "Didn't you ever pay attention in Divination? No… don't answer that."

Harry rolled his eyes, "I was just thinking… did I ever tell you about first year?"

"Public humiliation seems to ring a bell." Malfoy said wryly, tugging Harry down a corridor as a house elf rounded the opposite corner. Then Draco laughed, like everybody does when they realize just how naive they were at age eleven. So much wasted energy over a house cup and stupid rivalries.

"That's a no then." Here it went, all cards on the table. Harry had managed to blind himself, five years later he had actually forgotten why he had first encountered Voldemort, it wasn't because of a vendetta, it wasn't even because of him – it was because he stuck his nose where it didn't belong, and found himself in trouble. The only thing he'd ever wanted besides Harry's life. He was such a bloody idiot. Harry kept suffering terrible moments of panic where he said something important and he expected a cadre of death eaters to jump out from behind the tapestries and brutally murder him (or at least shout 'hurrah') but they never did. Not when he explained the Order, or Occlumency, or even Norbert, all of which had managed to come up in vital conversation, none of which mattered. This mattered, if only because Malfoy would be furious for his oversight, because Voldemort hadn't wanted him, Voldemort hadn't cared until Harry stuck his nose where it didn't belong – Malfoy had every right – Harry was afraid of losing his goal. The thought of revenge was all that kept him going, he couldn't afford to lose Malfoy's help. "It's just, I had a thought… that might have had something to with the Philosopher's Stone. The Stone is what Voldemort was after… but Dumbledore destroyed it."

Draco stopped dead and held his arm aloft, stopping Harry in his tracks and holding him there. This happened often when he was thinking on his feet, probably because Crabbe and Goyle progressed like human barges if not physically detained. "Tell me everything."

It took a full four minutes to cover the basics of the story, he left out Fluffy, Norbert, the seven obstacles, but Draco kept interrupting, and spent another two minutes resisting the urge to dance a jig or beat Harry to a mash. "What have you been brewing!?" He laughed, then tried again with more clarity. "There is no way Dumbledore destroyed the Philosopher's Stone! The stone was an accident, it's a priceless artifact, and no one knows how Flammel did it. Dumbledore wouldn't destroy it, he probably doesn't even know how!" Draco's hands clenched and unclenched with energy, balancing on the balls of his feet, this could be the answer to all of their problems if they could find it. If it still existed.

"But… Nicholas Flammel…" Harry's mild protest faded against Malfoy's grin. He knew better than anyone that some things were worth dying for. Harry winced as Malfoy practically crushed him in an exuberant hug, then backed away embarrassed daring him to comment. Harry hadn't minded in the least and said wryly "At least now we know what to give him."

Hope again, and Harry felt sick with it. At least when there had been no philosopher's stone and no potential for success the only difficulty was breaking the news; but now there was hope, and there was potential, and it made everything so much harder knowing there was the brief glimmer of a chance for them – and that it wouldn't happen. The pain of failure in collaboration with disappointment and absolutely knowing that everything would change for the worse – hope.

"Right. I'll be happy to let him know you're bringing a box of chocolates to the meeting. I'm sure he'll be absolutely delighted and he'll forget all about killing you."

* * *

The problem with Gryffindor common was the absolute lack of privacy. It was a daunting prospect for any young man to make a niche for himself in the brutally open and friendly environment, people were encouraged to sit with their friends to study, people were encouraged to associate with years not their own, they were encouraged to socialize and play exploding snap in front of the large fireplace, to sit over a loud and boisterous game of Wizard chess – Collin Creevy often thought it would be easier to be a Ravenclaw where the silence and need for privacy to study was overwhelming. Collin had never been an outgoing individual, he tended to live vicariously, smiling vaguely as his friends and family told jokes and stories somehow completely removed from himself, yes he had an arm, yes he could imagine basically the feeling of breaking his arm, but the bike his father had given him when he turned seven was sitting still unused in their garage and in no way could he experience the brief moment of soaring adrenaline as he raced down Devil's Corner and skidded on the curb, and couldn't hear the crack that he wasn't sure was real. Vicariously: through pictures, and stories, and the novels that kept him company as a child. The family he belonged to was supported by a milk delivery man, his brother regaled the stories of Collin's own school days to his muggle friends, their mother had abandoned him to a fatal car accident when Collin was five, his father delivered milk – Milquetoast. So here in the Gryffindor common room what he stood to do was the most terrifying, exhilarating experience of his life and his hands were shaking as he approached the object of his affections.

Ginny Weasley sat with her back to the fireplace, watching the staircases and occasionally smiling in tight-lipped humor at the scintillating conversation of one Claire Donahue from fourth year. She was isolated in her own way, pointedly not stepping in to fill the void left by her absent brothers, as the first Weasley witch in eight generations she was making herself out to be respectable. Collin was almost sad for her, every once in a long while she laughed without caution and he could see her stomp on the emotion moments later, feeling guilty because grieving siblings are not supposed to laugh. She had smiled without pretenses exactly three days ago and Collin had raised his camera in a flash, just before her smile slid away to be replaced with the sour grimace that only looked like one. There was something about her he found absolutely fascinating, something about her he was desperate to discover, that maybe if he took enough photographs, never took his eyes off of her he would see something new, and fresh, something so inherently lovely that even the gods could not match it. Collin would admit, even to himself, that he read far too much impossible romance.

Impossible romance, he liked that phrase for it, impossible that Ginny Weasley would ever look his way again because she had the estimable Harry Potter to adore, and impossible that she would ever let herself be in love. Collin liked to think he had a sporting chance, or would if he weren't so cowardly – if Harry Potter weren't so brave, if Ronald Weasley hadn't died, if Ginny's brothers were still around to show her that it was okay to laugh. Weasley Wizard Wheezes was still booming in Diagon Alley, the twins had taken the current situation and turned it into a large joke, creating sugary confectionaries sporting Dark Mark parodies that spouted things like "Death Eaters are Dorks" before consumption. It wasn't particularly intelligent, but the situation called for levity and so levity was had by both the twins and respective presses upon discovery. Ginny hadn't laughed, she read the article in the Daily Prophet and burst into tears. In her defense, Collin was quietly indignant and considered making badges until he realized that anti-Weasley sentiments, or perhaps a Support Ginny slogan would not be appreciated.

Maybe he did have a chance – maybe he stood to gain from all of this, from Ginny's apparent loneliness, and as horrible as the thought was maybe he could benefit from Ron's untimely death, step in to fill the void of beloved family member and confidant. Anything at all to be in her company, anything at all to see her smile, because Harry certainly wasn't making the effort. It was beyond him to feel anger or resentment towards Harry, he was the hero that saved Muggle born children from You-Know-Who, the humble and kind individual that had put up with his blatant idolatry all through Collin's first years of school, and the one person that hadn't threatened to break his camera though Harry was surely the subject of the majority of his work. During the course of his fourth year every Slytherin had mocked Collin for 'being in looooove with the boy who liiiiived', one ambitious Ravenclaw had asked to dissect him for a 'gay gene', and Ernie McMillain had offered him condolences over Cho having stolen Harry. It was embarrassing, and awkward, and he was confident that any other man would have cursed him six ways to Sunday for his constant and exuberant "Heya Harry!"'s, but Harry Potter had managed not to and that was something to be admired.

So though he knew, or thought he knew, that Ginny's eyes were inexorably locked on the Boy Who Lived, Collin was disinclined to hate him for it. It wasn't as though he could help it, or didn't have enough to worry about, or ever really smiled either, even when Dean Thomas had drawn a large poster of a Gryffindor lion flicking the Slytherin snake away with a single claw with a smug expression (McGonagall had awarded him five house points for beautiful workmanship) Harry had only smiled in the cursory 'haha' way. But still he wondered where the condolences were for Ginny, and why none of the Hufflepuffs had patted him on the back and said 'She'll see you eventually', and he wondered if the humble, and inconsequential son of a muggle might petition Ginny Weasley for her affections.

The common room worked strictly to his disadvantage as he had to cross in front of the plush and over crowded chairs to reach her, it was his heroic mission to crouch down beside her and shoot an apologetic smile in Claire's direction, "Hey Ginny… do you think I could talk to you for a minute?"

"Finally!" said someone in the background and his heart leapt into his throat, "Check!"

* * *

End of chapter - I love reviews - they fuel my desire to post more. Though I don't have the "Can't write without reviews" threat anymore, thank god. 


	21. Arguing to Lose

**Disclaimer: **Harry Potter does not belong to me, in no way do I lay claim to Harry Potter – the long and short of it is folks – there'd be no legal ground suing me because I'm not delusional enough to think that I'm a British multi-millionaire.

**Author's Notes: **In this chapter, just so you are aware, there is a scene I've chopped out of the last segment – just a paragraph I'll grant you, but if you're into that sort of thing you can find it on my Live journal page. In fact, you can find the entire, re-edited, uncut archive (this will include some more NC-17 scenes in later chapters) at Malf0yM0nkeys. Come visit, if you give me feedback, I will give you cyber hugs. Now ya know!

* * *

CHAPTER 21: Arguing to Lose

"Don't you think Malfoy could be toying with you?" Hermione sprung the question on him like a well laid trap; she was so casual and unperturbed by the whole thing that it took a solid chunk of time before Harry realized something was amiss with the situation. She was calmly sitting in an armchair knitting, Harry felt an absurd urge to protest this tiny detail, people who were knitting baby socks should not ask questions like that, especially in the same detached tone one might enquire about the weather.

He had been attempting to finish his Charms homework, and unconsciously answered before he had the time to panic about the question. "The thought has occurred to me yes."

Hermione lost her cool and her weave. Harry's mind took another obscure corner through 'it's a good thing Marjorie is out' before she exploded in his direction, the needles and mushroom flying out of her hands. It vaguely occurred to him to wonder if she hadn't been so calm through force of will, this was clearly a litany that had been building for months against his behavior, and he weathered it. "Why are you doing this to us? Hasn't it occurred to you that the people around you are worried? What do you think Sirius would say! For god's sake Harry, it's Draco Malfoy – he's been an evil little twerp since the moment we met him and if you think he's changed at all over the years you've lost your senses! I hardly know you anymore – you don't even care that your relatives are dead! Do you really think Ron, and Hagrid, and Sirius, and everybody else gave their lives for you so you could… throw it away on MALFOY!?"

She was breathing hard, chest heaving. Harry by contrast was calmer than the castle stones; he had been waiting for this moment for some time waiting for Hermione to protest his behavior somehow, but hadn't expected it to be so abrupt, nor so verbal. He thought to console himself, it was the stress, she was under a lot of pressure with grades, and the Weasleys, and still so attached to Marjorie who was expanding by the day. He thought to convince himself that his last friend would understand everything once it was over, once Voldemort was dead, or Harry was dead, or the entire world had burst into flame. He thought to console himself with the cruel admission that Ron hadn't died for _him_; but he found he didn't need to.

There was something about the hysteria in her voice that put Harry in mind of afternoon soap operas. "No no! Damien couldn't have killed Lucretia, no, not my dear, sweet, beautiful daughter who is also my niece! DAMIEN!!!" It was hard not to laugh in her face, throwing his life away, hah. Where was she when Sirius died, and who did Harry have to turn to when they brought Ron's corpse up from the village? Where was Hermione when Dumbledore announced Hagrid's death and where was she when he came out of the maze with Cedric? For that matter, where was Hermione when Harry was handed the letter about Cho? Not with him, not when he needed her company, or her logical defenses. Had it really come as such a surprise when he began ignoring her entirely?

Malfoy was the only person in Hogwarts not wrapped in their own melodrama, and quite possibly the only person in the world that Harry could stand for more than five minutes at a time. He hadn't needed companionship or Hermione's icy stares, he'd needed help, a sounding board, and Malfoy was the only person left. It had occurred to him, Malfoy's origins, his father, their history of blatant idiocy and enmity, it had occurred to him that Malfoy could be very subtly trying to kill him; it had occurred to him that the whole world might be there to help him if he asked for it. But Harry wouldn't ask, and Hermione's self-righteous anger only made him retreat further into his.

"Quite right." Harry said with calculated calm, "that's not why they died at all."

It was a verbal slap, but she rallied magnificently, using that ever-powerful argument as practiced by parents and bad psychologists across the globe. "Can't you see that everybody's worried about you?!"

Harry wanted to spit in her face, he wanted to reach across the table and choke the life out of her. 'They' weren't worried about him, if 'they'd' ever had the capacity to worry about him it was only in the sense that he was 'the boy who lived' the 'prophecy bringer' blah blah blah., he was all of their hopes and expectations for destroying Voldemort, and he wasn't living up to snuff. Harry very seriously doubted 'they' would blink before finding his replacement. He didn't say anything in response, didn't even clench his fists – the rage was there, but if Hermione was its victim he would only give her justification. Instead, he calmly packed up his quill and ink, carefully rolled his Charm's scroll into a neat little bundle, and made to leave the room.

"I'm so disappointed in you Harry." Came floating from behind him, and Harry wondered what right she had to feel anything for him.

* * *

"The boy is an idiot and a danger to us all, if you don't do something about him soon he'll only become worse."

It was not the first time Severus Snape would be leaving the Headmaster's office with a grimace. Snape was a typically caustic man, full of rage that he carefully contained and siphoned off with stinging force through vicious rhetoric. The first twenty four years of his life had been spent in the company of dark magic, his parents both ardent practitioners of the less-than-savory arts. At age twenty-five he had turned to Albus Dumbledore seeking refuge from the Death Eaters who he could no longer bear to associate with, going so far as to offer his resignation from the position of Potions master. A resignation that Dumbledore had refused to accept. The man had been a spy it was true, but he was an excellent teacher, and at the time there was no information Dumbledore would share that could be a detriment. The Headmaster had not regretted his decision to keep Snape on his staff, nor had he regretted the decision to welcome him into the folds of the Order, but he did occasionally wish the man would refrain from sharpening his tongue on the other members – including himself. "Yes Severus, I'll give it due consideration thank you."

Professor Albus Dumbledore sighed. Yes, he would consider the situation carefully and with great reluctance, because someone had to. In all his years as a human being, Dumbledore had never been married, never had children, and never regretted their lack. The school was his home and his fortress, every student within his walls a charge and child of his, but he never really understood the responsibilities of parenthood. Until now. Perhaps Severus had been right all along in his assumptions that such blatant favoritism had spoiled the boy rotten. But like every good parent he let guilt and familial love blind him to the truth.

If Harry hadn't been given to the Dursleys, would Sirius Black be dead today? If Harry had been introduced to wizardom earlier in life would he still be so incautious of Voldemort, so brash? If Dumbledore had just taken him in hand and explained the circumstances of his life would he still consistently go chasing his death? There were a great many things about Harry Potter that Dumbledore could blame himself for. Had the protection that had kept him hidden for so long jaded him to authority; if Harry had had caring adults in his life would he still be so reluctant to come to them for help? For that matter, if the ministry and the staff of Hogwarts hadn't so obviously thrown the rules to the four winds, would Harry Potter still flaunt them, or was it in his nature to defy command in favor of instinct?

Yes, Dumbledore felt a great deal of guilt for his mistakes, and it was because of those self-same mistakes that he could not bring himself to give up on him. Harry would surely overcome this phase and become a better person for it – Dumbledore had to believe that or he had nothing left to hope for. He sighed again. Neville Longbottom never would have given him this trouble.

* * *

"You sybaritical son of a bitch!" They were arguing. It was high time, the nonsensical camaraderie had been niggling at him like Luna's nonexistent Bertwangles because there was no possible way he got on with Draco Malfoy. It was begun as something trivial, but a pervading sense of wrongdoing had been seeping through Harry for some weeks, wriggling around under his skin whenever they shot each other sardonic grins, and eagerly awaiting its opportunity to come to a head – it had found just such an event. Surely this wasn't what he'd had in mind when Harry promised himself resolution, but he hadn't seen another way.

Now he couldn't know what he was thinking, the world seemed full of other ways and it was a suddenly nerve-wracking place. This was Malfoy! Was he really so desperate to replace Ron, did Hagrid die so he could sell himself to Voldemort? Where was Hermione with her cool logic to smack some sense into him? She had tried, and he hadn't seen until now how right she'd been; her words had been eating at him, burrowing under his skin until he couldn't see logic in his decision to trust Malfoy. It was about the plan, the terrible plan that wasn't much of a plan at all. Harry had been stupid enough to express his discontent because it was a bad plan that admitted no modification and would undoubtedly degenerate into 'running away and trying not to die' – granted he was never the most tactful person, but it was a bad plan. Malfoy was going to get him killed, he was totally isolated and dependent now, and if he didn't back out…. Voldemort wanted something – this time he'd actually get it. Tensions were running high, and they finally had snapped.

"What the hell would you know about it Potter?!"

Harry had quite forgotten the initial argument, he couldn't exactly recall if it were about the nuances of potion making or about relative genealogy, but he was more than ready to continue the spite on another thread. "Exactly." He said with unerring malice, "How do I _know_ you're not going to just hand me over to Voldemort?" And that was the source of it really. It wasn't any of the things that he'd been telling himself; it wasn't that Ron would be disgusted, Harry was too angry that Ron wasn't _around_ to care about propriety to really feel concern for his feelings. It wasn't that everyone and their dog apparently wanted to die for him – it was because he trusted Malfoy implicitly and wanted a reason not to.

For whatever reasons of his own, Malfoy had proved to be the perfect solution to his problems, he kept his word and his silence like Ron and Hermione never quite managed to, he lied to both Dumbledore and Voldemort with a straight face and barely a flinch – Malfoy was so suspiciously unsuspicious that it made Harry's skin crawl and his mind trying to wriggle out of his ears to come apart at the seams.

Malfoy looked gobsmacked – staring blankly at the spot somewhere above Harry's shoulder with his mouth slightly ajar. "Who's to say," Harry continued, not quite knowing where this urge stemmed from, of course Hermione wasn't right, "that you haven't been feeding him information all along. That you haven't been trying to worm into my life just to kill me in my sleep!?" He was being completely irrational now – where were the good fairies with the reality sticks when he needed them – even as the words left his mouth he realized just how ludicrous they sounded, but he couldn't stop himself.

Draco clamped his jaw shut with effort, grinding his teeth together. He charitably neglected to point out how easy it would have been. Of the times Harry had practically passed out in his arms, didn't mention how sick and wasted Harry looked until Draco shoved a sandwich in his mouth one afternoon. Draco was even kind enough not to suggest that it was well within his abilities to indeed smother him in his sleep, let him starve, shove him bodily from the astronomy tower, or (the much more attractive notion) throttle him on the spot. Harry still wasn't worth it. "Look you," He practically growled, fumbling the button on his sleeve open and violently yanking it past his elbow, exposing his inner arm. "Whenever I think about him, it aches. Whenever he calls me, I would rather saw off my own arm than deal with the pain. But I put up with it, I obey the summons, I even put up with you, and if you insist on being such a bloody-minded moron you should at least know that I have just as much reason to hate him as you do!"

Harry glowered; shoving the branded arm aside, feeling stupid, put upon, and defensive all in one go. Once again Malfoy refused to let him be the unfortunate orphan, Harry wanted more than anything to resent him for it. "So why did you join?" he spat, knowing the answer, "why don't you run? Too afraid they'll kill you?" Malfoy's silence was further leave to berate him – Harry kept on as a singular corner of his mind wailed for absolute cessation of verbal contact, his brain had clearly taken a walk and had left his idiot mouth in charge. "You know what, you're just a coward! Too scared to pick a side until you see who's winning!"

Malfoy moved. Harry didn't even have time to blink before Malfoy's right hand came sweeping around to catch him a blow on the cheek that knocked stars into his eyes. Harry was absurdly grateful that Malfoy was left handed, or he would be sitting quite firmly on his rear. "Dying would be the easy thing." Draco said tersely, hardly trusting himself to speak. Harry was being an idiot – it wasn't very difficult to spot, mostly his mouth was moving – but he had managed to strike a nerve nonetheless, and it was a near thing to keep his own tongue. He was afraid, "But if you want to pussy out, you can stop blaming me and go hang Potter."

Harry was left standing in the hall with a bruise rising on his cheek as Malfoy stalked away. All of this was so wrong.

Malfoy was right, of course he was right. Harry cursed himself roundly, furiously berating his own idiocy and belligerence. The mental tirade carried him all the way up to Gryffindor and landed him in an armchair where he sat fuming, glowering at the brick wall. Stupid Malfoy. He wasn't afraid. He wasn't apathetic, or distant, or any of the things he had strived so hard to be this year; he resented the world, hated people and their idle thoughtlessness, despised the fact that when he died he would still be known as 'the boy who lived.' He wanted to be left alone for all of eternity, wanted to shove people away, wanted to leave them without a shadow of a doubt that he was not to be approached.

… he was afraid. Voldemort was terrifying, but terror faded. Their encounters were agony, but pain receded. The only thing Harry could rely upon was this: facing down Voldemort inevitably resulted in death. His parents, the Dursleys, Quirrel, Cedric, Sirius, Cho, Ron… who would it be this time? Hermione, Malfoy, Lupin, Dumbledore… him? Harry prayed for the last, but couldn't stomach the permanence. It was the irreversibility that scared him, and once he was truly committed there was no going back – beyond the theory was the wide world of practice and the terror of absolute finality. Malfoy had been right all along, he wanted to curl up in a ball and hide for a week, a month, the rest of time – he wanted to sleep until eternity came.

And everything would be wasted. Malfoy was leaving in the morning to settle some affairs at the manor and suffer his bi-weekly interview with the Dark Lord. The mark on his arm had stood out black as pitch, it must have been throbbing like fire, and even that would be useless. Harry felt more guilt than anger now, it sent his stomach seething and his heart to the vicinity of his toes. He fought valiantly against wallowing in self pity, and very nearly succeeded.

Four hours after Harry's attack on his loyalties, Malfoy was furiously shoving things into a bag. Signed documents claiming rightful ownership of the Malfoy vault at Gringotts were pushed in and a list of research texts followed it with a terrible crunching noise. Crabbe and Goyle fled the scene with a sharp look, MacDougal and Zabini followed them at a more sedate pace, excusing themselves for dinner an hour too early, but their actions left little room for doubt that Draco was lord and master of the dorms.

Stupid Potter, he viciously rammed the final scroll home and yanked up the zip. Draco wanted to lose his mind, and all because of Stupid, Idiot Potter. It had been so hard not to blurt out what was really on his mind: his concern, his weariness. He couldn't sleep anymore than Harry could for waking up in cold sweats, dreading exposure, and never said a word. Potter could hang for making him so… illogical.

The door creaked and closed behind him. Malfoy spun and glared, expecting to see an idiot lackey standing in the causeway, but he saw nothing. There was no wind. Draco sat at the end of his bed and sighed helplessly. "I owe you an apology." Said Harry Potter's head as it emerged from the invisibility cloak, followed swiftly by the rest of him.

"Yes you do." Draco looked up with his chin in his hands, Harry moved very slowly, gingerly choosing a seat as though Draco were a rabid dog, ready to lunge.

He had stood outside the Slytherin portal, impatiently waiting for someone to move the statue aside, but it was some time before anyone did. Having hunted Malfoy down and stationed himself outside the dorm (with liberal instruction from the Marauder's Map which nonetheless refused to give up the password) Harry prepared to wait until after dinner and thought it was a minor miracle that he didn't have to. "Neffarium" snuck him through the door and into the cold and elegant common with its perfectly maintained leather couches. "I'm sorry." That was the easy part. "I … you were…"

"Shut up Potter."

Harry shut up and Draco turned around scrutinizing him as though he were an unusual specimen of beetle. "Some bruise you have there." He said, leaning in to gently touch Harry's cheek. Draco's fingers were icy, Harry winced.

"Yes well, we both know which idiot to thank for that." Malfoy laughed and Harry sunk towards him, the stiffness evaporating from his shoulders and anxiety leaving him in mass exodus. It wasn't quite normal, of course it wasn't, because it was never normal, but if Harry couldn't be safe here then there was nothing for him and loyalties didn't matter. "I know you're not working for – "

He had been told to shut up. Harry's problem often lay in when. Draco ended the sentence quite effectively by holding Harry's mouth closed with his own. It was a very reasonable solution to idiot babbling he always thought, and Harry's eyelids flickered shut in agreement.

**Look, every time I post anything that's mildly risqué I get in trouble for it. I kid you not, I have this horrible tendency to write stories to which no one responds, and yet I always get in bloody trouble. I've had this account suspended more than once. If you'd like to read the following two paragraphs, get your butts out to my LJ page and read 'em there. **

Morning found Harry in Hagrid's cabin having taken refuge from the early morning breakfast goers. The smoked hams and rabbit furs still hung from the walls, but there was something missing. The fire hadn't been lit in months, the perpetual smell of roasted stoat and large dog didn't hover around the kitchen table, the milk in the cupboard had lost its preservation charm. There was no noise, no Hagrid. Malfoy had gone. Harry had a great deal more than Quidditch scores on his mind.

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End of chapter, yes I'm sure you hate me. I find this bit to be a bit tedious (excepting the part with Snape) but I really like the next chapter for some terrible reason – I suppose it's the beginning of the end, though Chapter 20 (in all fairness) was The (true) Beginning of the end. Point is, hopefully you'll like it too. 


	22. Switchback Vacation

**Disclaimer: **Me no own Harry. Simple enough? ...but if somebody wants to give me Draco for my birthday I'll be _very _appreciative (insert licentious wink here).

**Author's Notes: **It's a pretty simplistic chapter but I like it, not a lot of character development with my tertiary characters, but then… if you pay attention there may be passing plot. You know me and plot – I know what it is, and hypothetically where it lives, but I can't say I've ever been there. Either way, you can find the entire, re-edited, uncut archive (this will include some more NC-17 scenes in later chapters) at Malf0yM0nkeys. Come visit, if you give me feedback, I will bow and write you haikus (for fun. Of course).

**Special Thanks To:**

**Squishy: **I'm glad you're enjoying it thus far! …yeah, I am really long winded. Believe it or not this story started as an exercise in not using dialogue, ergo all the long mental side-trips, but then it got away from me… very very far away. Anyway, thanks so much for reviewing, you have no idea how happy that made me.

**Cheely: **Thank you so much for making the effort to review, considering that it's not your first language, your English is beautiful. I'm glad to hear that you liked the story, particularly the discussion on tyranny, I was feeling a bit awkward about that segment and it really made my day to hear someone enjoyed it. Hopefully you'll like this chapter just as much, and thanks again for reviewing.

* * *

Chapter 22 - Switchback Vacation

Harry sighed irritably and pushed his textbook off the table in a fit of frustration. Well that exhausted that venue. The book now laying splayed on the floor was Zyglan's Poisons, the final accessible potions book for students. An entire anthology of pesticides and weed killers that Zyglan had so charmingly labeled 'poison'; Harry wanted to spit on the author and all of his descendants that had kept the book in publication since 1542. He'd even stolen Poisoning People for Pleasure and Profit from Seamus (who was beginning a very heteroclitic collection of literature) but it had turned out to be a series of 17th century essays by paid assassins.

He honestly couldn't expect much from a school library. Most of the books would be outdated and harmless – the real potions education began long after school ended. After all, a facility fit to burst with hormonal teenagers and monstrous pre-teens couldn't possibly know what every student was engaged in at all times: censorship of Dangerous Materials was an acceptable caution. Harry thought Ministry was a lot of silly buggers who couldn't be bothered to take responsibility for their students.

As it turned out, thinking up the stone was the easy bit. Practical resources pertaining to the Philosopher's Stone were extremely limited, and any relevant information had been handed to them by an eleven-year-old Hermione. The stone drew its power from the fields around it, if locked in a wine cellar for a year it would stop producing the Elixir of Life and start producing a sharp Blush.

It transformed the things it touched by measuring its energies against the things the stone had previously come into contact with; Harry couldn't help wondering what Dudley's old jeans had done to it.

Harry needed it to absorb a poison and produce poison in return, but he either couldn't find something that could be safely transmuted by the stone, or he couldn't find the poison specific to a person, more often than not he couldn't find either. If it was safe to be transmuted, adding an 'individual' spell component made the whole thing fall apart and vice versa - If Voldemort wanted to test it, it would be incredibly inconvenient if one of his loyal Death Eaters keeled over dead before Voldemort himself could drink the Elixir. Bloody pesticides, it was infuriating.

If possible, Malfoy's luck had been worse, he'd come so close only to realize that poisons that affected only specific individuals were hard to come by and extraordinarily delicate without part of the person themselves – their magical signature alone would not suffice. A strand of Voldemort's hair would be somewhat difficult to come by. If this progressed, Harry would die of frustration and with any luck people would leave him alone in the afterlife.

"Is there something wrong with your text book Mister Potter?" Only one voice could say 'Mister Potter' quite like that, even after six years of the same tone his heart still stopped as the capital letters snapped into place. McGonagall was standing directly beside his desk, tapping her foot impatiently until Harry looked up. She frowned and nudged the cover with the toe of her boot.

"Not at all professor. Miranda Goshawk is thrilling as usual." Harry heard a gasp and knew that somewhere in the room Hermione was staring at him in astonishment, but Harry was far beyond caring about house points or detentions. For all he knew, Hufflepuff was in the lead.

"Happy to hear it Mister Potter, then perhaps you could tell your classmates the approximate result of cellular transfiguration?"

Harry blinked, someone snickered and was quickly silenced by a glare. Transfiguration of cellular material… there was an idea, the precursor to apparition and animagus transformations which they would be starting in a few weeks time, but you had to have a grasp of micro-biology that he simply lacked. If you knew what you were doing then not only would the shape of the subject be changed, but the entire chemical makeup of the organism would also reflect the spell. A cat would not be disguised as a dog, it would become a dog. It was a technique for permanence and undetectable self-transformation, but Harry's knowledge of microbiology only extended as far as what modern cinema could demonstrate: "Soup?"

A few of Harry's more adventurous classmates laughed, "In your case Mister Potter that may be correct. Five points from Gryffindor, if you want to take up gardening do it on your own time, and take better care of school property."

There were volleys of groaning and malicious chuckles as Professor McGonagall resumed her lecture. Moments later when the class had settled into the boring routine of 'tomorrow we begin the practical application. Many of you will make mistakes, but those of you that succeed will note on immediate difference in your transfigurations. The process was begun by Wizard, Second class,…" Something smacked Harry in the back of the head and landed on his chair.

Twisting around, Harry unfolded the little note and rolled his eyes. Hermione couldn't possibly have waited until after class for an excuse to express 'concern' or demand an explanation which he didn't have to give; she had to waste paper by writing 'What was THAT about?' Harry flipped her the bird over his shoulder. "Mister Potter!"

* * *

Draco Malfoy had once inadvertently told Harry Potter about the small room under the drawing room floor, but then he had not fully understood nor appreciated its significance. How awful could it really be? Exploding teapots and charms that made your nose drop off were a part of daily life, but in the much censured world of dark magic, Draco had not realized just what magic had the potential to be. He did now. So long ago, surrounded by Malfoy splendor and idealism his life choices seemed so obvious. Follow your father, join the dark lord, kill Harry Potter, eliminate muggles and mudbloods, bask in the glory of the media when the world finally discovered just how right you were. He had been spouting rhetoric that hadn't belonged to him for so long it had seeped into his bones and deposited a layer of callous disregard for non-wizards, sub-humans. Damn his mothers eyes for making him think differently – for making him think at all. The Manor in the light of day, removed from the dark romanticism that belonged to Bela Lugosi and gothic psychological horror, was large, gauche, and dusty. Draco didn't see the potential or the magic anymore.

The compartment under the drawing room floor was hardly a collection of loose manuscripts and crystal balls hidden by dust, straw and planking. It was in fact a chamber full of catalogued and carefully maintained instruments, crucibles, and a semi-library of very specific texts. When the Ministry of Magic had raided their home (for which Draco received a sound thrashing for letting the information slip) they had retrieved more of the practical items and left those based entirely in theory – it was clear that the Illegal Magics branch severely underestimated the influence of books. These were books that could sear your eyes out, books that made you go mad, books whose contents were forever inaccessible until the correct hands opened them, and hidden carefully among them were legitimate volumes of text and instructions detailing the most dangerous magics known to man. In these Draco made use of what he could, spending his week away from Hogwarts buried in the family library reading both perfectly ordinary and highly contraband documents under the disapproving sniffs of family portraits.

He had convinced the Headmaster of his need to be here with relative ease, it was just a question of signing ownership deeds before his Great Uncle Harden could break down the estate, some final financial concerns relating to Lucius' treason and Narcissa's funeral, blah blah blah. Dumbledore had sent him off with a wave. It was disconcerting how readily the Headmaster dismissed him, but Draco's need to be in the Manor itself was greater than his discontent, because hidden away in the Manor was the infamous Malfoy Vault; that highly vaunted treasure trove of family secrets, and wealth rumored beyond imagination. No one but a Malfoy by blood had access to it, and no one outside the family had ever even seen it. Not even Voldemort. It was here that Draco found exactly what he was looking for.

Draco despised opening this door: he found the ritual a tasteless and a waste of arcane significance. It was a lock designed in the days when Malfoys did not gain power through aristocratic snarkiness, but took it by blood and at wand point – it suited Lucius to a T, Draco scorned it as the quixotic notions of teenaged girls. It was ridiculous, there was a knife provided for generations of Malfoy heirs to drip blood all over a rock with doodles on it, and mutter nonsense about family loyalty, purebloods, and true power. There was a time when Draco would have called this a significant right of passage and proof of his superiority, there was also a time that he jumped off the garden shed believing he could fly without a broom. Now he muttered about cost effectiveness and getting a damned key as the door dissolved into a tidy chamber full of manifest power.

Nearly overflowing from the room were wands, goblets, chests stuffed to the brim with power stones, crystals, cards, books, dusty vials filled with potions, there was delicately crafted jewelry, there were mosaics, tapestries, and statues - even a large podium with the Malfoy Family Tree, carefully detailing every generation of Malfoys and their blood-cousins since the days of Junius Malfoy, all written in tiny script. It was an impressive collection; unfortunately, Draco was given to assume that the only catalogue of the rolling splendor lay entirely in his genealogy. It was an archivist's nightmare and personal incentive – if he survived to see it again, it would become his life's mission to thoroughly organize this disaster.

There is some quantum rule of humanity that long-time owners of homes should have an ancestral mess stored somewhere – this was the Malfoy attic.

And when he'd found it buried amongst the clutter and the enchanted pearls, Draco thought he'd lost his mind. He had to tell Harry – it was all too easy, so easy in fact he could hardly bring himself to believe it was real. The surreal dizziness hit him like a half-brick and he found himself sitting very abruptly on the floor, cradling his precious flask. It was here, all here, right in front of him and he'd completely missed it. He read and re-read the note attached to the bottle in his hand, was he hallucinating, if he came back in the morning would he find the same words or would it amount to marsh gas and love-potions? 'Azrael's Mercy: In ten years time,' the note read, 'the potion will stabilize. It grows more potent by the day, and cannot be diluted. In ten years time I will have my revenge! Cyrus Reynard Malfoy, 1862.'

Yes, it would work. Azrael's Mercy, otherwise known as 'Suicide's Lover' or colloquially as 'The bloody stupid waste of plant life', was a relatively simple combination of non-magical poisons, and therefore couldn't be detected by magic. Created by a vindictive muggle, the potion remained as potent whether stirred by wand or wooden spoon and only grew in strength with time. It fit all of the criteria, they could use a focus of the Dark Lord's to give the potion specific operating zones, it couldn't be detected through magical means, and it could safely be transmuted by the stone. Draco had initially discarded it because in the first stages of the potion's life the liquid was too unstable to be diluted and had to be directly ingested or the effects were reduced to a mild fever and stomach cramps, only after time could a person safely drip some over food or into a teacup and expect results. The potion was more often created for its novelty of non-magic than its practicality because only someone attempting suicide would be stupid enough to drink it before the year was out and expect results. Draco hadn't had a year or more to wait and the consequences of transmuting the too-weak liquid through the philosopher's stone were completely unknown so he'd let Azrael's Mercy fall squarely in the impossible pile. But this… the potion had had 135 years to steep… it would take an entire ocean of alcohol to break down the chemical components into a non-fatal substance (1).

The liquid had been reduced to glutinous brown sludge and made a sort of gurgle-plop noise when Draco tried to swish it around. He had to tell Harry. He had to tell Harry because this was a miracle of epic proportions – he'd been absentmindedly alphabetizing the assembled potions and the answer to his problem practically fell into his lap. At the going rate he would probably find an exact duplicate of the Philosopher's Stone in a dusty corner of Diagon Alley; the unexpected windfall made him slightly nauseous. Draco had fought tooth and nail for everything since his father was arrested, and this sudden ease both confused and unnerved him. If he thought for a moment anyone with access to the vault could possibly want to help him… but no, all of the Malfoys were dead, in hiding, or making a nuisance of themselves in Wales. He had to tell Harry.

He didn't want to tell Harry. What if they never found the stone? All of this research, the potion in his hand, everything he'd placed hope in would be moot which was almost more than he could take. If he told Potter… Potter would obviously think it was brilliant, an incredible stroke of luck, and it was, but it also meant that he was just that much closer to meeting Voldemort, that much closer to dying. The Dark Lord had no intentions of welcoming Harry into the circle of Death Eaters, he wanted him for something, an experiment, or possibly an 'example', but never to keep him. Something about Harry's hysterical argument some three nights before had struck a chord, he _was _leading him to his death – not intentionally of course. Draco found he actually liked the silly bastard, but the result would be the same. Harry would die and it was only because of his fanatical devotion to ridding the world of Voldemort and revenge that Potter was willing to risk it at all. No, he didn't want to tell Harry at all, because telling him only meant progression and finality; and a very secret part of Draco Malfoy wished he had never opened the vault.

* * *

Dumbledore hadn't offered him a lemondrop. Harry sat stiff and silent in the hard wooden chair while the headmaster scrutinized him. He stared back, then away, noting the sea of faces glaring at him from the walls. There had undoubtedly been a loud and heated argument prior to Harry's arrival, the only sign of which was flushed faces and dark scowls. Each of the now-deceased heads of Hogwarts would have struggled with the monumental burden of their own input, and resultant feuding would have spurned week-long battles of pointed 'harumphing.' Harry cared not in the slightest. He found the whole thing a bit ridiculous, leadership by committee was always inefficient, but when all of the members had at one point been the Headmaster, the pure mass in ego drowned out any relevance.

Harry met Dumbledore's gaze with genuine confusion and the slightest bit of suspicion. Was he going to open with that all-time doozy of a question again 'Is there anything you'd like to tell me Harry?' or was he simply going to stare. There could be no complaints, Harry was attending his lectures – even turning in his homework, he was a ghost among his peers, and often he stared silently out of the windows lost to his thoughts, but he was there. Was this about his lack of interest, his hatred of the general populace? Was this little chat going to be about Quidditch once more (which had been cancelled promptly following the attack on Hogsmeade), his habit of never being in the dorm for bedcheck, or something more serious like his general state of mind?

Just as unfamiliar apprehension was welling under his ribs, Dumbledore sighed. "I've been trying to broach the subject gently," said the venerable old man finally, "but I think for the sake of clarity I'll be frank. Are you, or are you not going to become a Death Eater?"

Harry was taken aback, he suspected this interview might have been in regards to his recent violent behavior. People were so stupid, so easily recovered it appalled him. They were all so eager to chat, to get on with their little lives as if nothing happened "nothin' to see here folks, move along now" he just got so furious with them. Harry sat in stony silence, not entirely surprised by Dumbledore's suspicions, just disgusted. His parents and nearly everyone he'd ever loved since had been murdered by one man, but everyone including the so-called perceptive Headmaster thought he would betray everyone in such a way. Or worse that he would betray himself, because apparently everyone else had forgotten that Voldemort wanted Harry dead more than anything on earth.

Harry supposed, in a back handed sort of way, that it was a good thing. If even the Headmaster suspected him, he might have a ghost of a chance, but he could feel his fingers twitching themselves into fists and his eyes narrowing.

"You must understand my concern Harry. You seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time with Draco Malfoy, who has known Death Eater affiliations, and Professor McGonagall tells me that you are disrespectful to your fellow Gryffindors."

Harry could guess at a number of things Minerva McGonagall had to say on his behalf, but it would be kinder not to. He wanted to say something scathing along the lines of 'so why aren't you rewarding me for inter-house communications?' or perhaps to inform Dumbledore that Malfoy was apparently the only human being within 20 miles that could rub two brain cells together, but he refrained from that as well.

Harry felt the irrational urge to point out that while Malfoy was still technically marked, so was Snape, and so had been Quirrell, at least Malfoy wasn't in a position of power over impressionable students. And hadn't all of those working detentions been meant as a lesson? you're much stronger as friends than as rivals blah, blah, blah. It was Dumbledore's dream come true: Malfoy and Potter were fri – well, no they weren't friends. Friends compared Quidditch notes, they didn't plot assassination, but they _were_ something involving a certain level of mutual respect.

Harry wanted to rage at him, wanted to show the old man exactly what was on his mind in the most physical terms possible. Who was it that secured that information, was it a member of his precious order, or was it a fourteen-year-old kid chained to a headstone and forced to watch men cut their own hands off? He wanted nothing more than to hex Dumbledore out of spite, or maybe to leap out the window. He would have bet his last Galleon that Hermione was somewhere behind this little interview.

Given enough time Harry could write a comprehensive list of precisely four-hundred and thirty-seven reasons, most of them names, why he was not nor never would be a Death Eater, but he said nothing. Wasn't it the first lesson in Occlumency to control your emotions. Snape would have been proud if he could ever bring himself to admit it, and Harry wasn't giving Dumbledore access to his thoughts this time around. The incredible, blind, ignorant old fool. "With all due respect, Headmaster, I'm not going to answer that."

* * *

Malfoy was breathing hard, nausea swept over him with every tentative step. Voldemort's power did not lay with his strength but his presence. He made even a Malfoy taste the fear and resentment of a trapped animal, fighting his instinct to smash his head against the cage bars. The dark lord was… overpowering, grotesque; Malfoy could feel him in his blood, raking across his unconscious mind with every word he forced out. "The news is excellent My Lord."

"So I see." Voldemort's voice was raw, thick with disuse and overconfidence. Draco's whole being wanted to retch violently, but he held still, deferentially keeping his eyes at Voldemort's toes, "Your father is well."

"My father is a fool," Draco replied callously, there was no room for family: as a Malfoy it would probably be his duty to carry on the time-honored tradition of Patricide. Tom Riddle would approve. Besides, Lucius' failings were his own; Draco could only roll his eyes and hope that Lucius dropped off the face of the earth before he was forced to deal with it. "My loyalties are only to you Master." His mind screamed.

"It is true that Lucius has never done well in captivity." Draco could feel the dark lord sneering, he carefully kept a straight face, trying not to imagine the ghastly aperture Voldemort called a mouth. When the dark lord began to laugh, Draco swallowed back bile, "I disgust you young Malfoy?"

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes you ugly, vile, freak of nature! Draco was ready to rip his skin off and run for the door just to get away from the _thing_ he'd been occupying the room with. How he ever could have been in admiration of such a slimy, doughy, spidery piece of filth was beyond him – he'd been such an idiot. "Never My Lord."

"You're lying." Draco's eyes flickered up in blind panic to slide across Voldemort's and he cursed himself for his mistake. He could feel Voldemort probing his mind in that instant, raking across his conscious like dirty fingernails on a blackboard: scraping at every thought he'd ever had and flooding his mind with white-hot pain until he could finally tear his gaze away. Now Voldemort would know everything: Harry was plotting against him, Draco loathed him, he would learn everything and Draco had nightmarish visions of being cursed under Imperio, Harry would be led into a trap, or he would blurt something vitally important and they would both die in excruciating ways.

He had been told and told again never to meet the dark lord's gaze, his father had once explained that Voldemort was unconsciously powerful, that he knows your thoughts before you do. His father was wrong, Voldemort's possession of a mind was deliberate and cruel, it pained the inhabitant beyond belief, his father was an idiot. Harry would throttle him if all of the Occlumency, the effort, the sleepless nights and the pain of futile pursuit was wasted. Harry would happily rip off his ears and shove them up his arse for all those hours of beating their brains out on useless potion etiquette and unfounded references to baseball only to never get a chance. Because Voldemort's primary talent was reading people, and it wasn't hard to figure out that more than anything in the world Harry Potter would like to boil Voldemort's head in curry sauce. That Draco had to help could only follow, he couldn't not help.

It was his mother's dying wish that he figure things out on his own. It was Harry's dying wish, and the rest of the world could rot. How could Voldemort not know? "But your information about Potter seems accurate."

Draco started to breathe again and the relief was so overwhelming he wanted to cry. All of Slytherin knew that Draco was working for the dark lord, and all of Hogwarts was watching Potter: people would talk, they always did. Death Eaters would make their juvenile reports. Voldemort would have known months ago that 'pst, Malfoy and Potter are up to something, what do you think it is' 'Oh Harry's gone over the edge, he beat the hell out of Ernie McMillian last month for making a Weasley is our King joke last week, remember?' The incriminating evidence was all there, Harry had been happily sharing his views on verbal diplomacy with anyone stupid enough to get near him. Ernie McMillian had been humming "Weasley is our King" on the way from Herbology one afternoon, Potter hit him so hard he lost a molar and Ernie probably never knew why.

"He does not… trust Headmaster Dumbledore, My Lord." Which was also true, but Voldemort was damned stupid for believing it made any difference. "I believe he will come to you."

"You do, don't you?" It was not a question. Draco clenched his teeth and swallowed his gag reflex, mildly holding Voldemort's gaze with a practiced look of adoration. "You have done well young Malfoy."

"Thank you my lord."

Draco let his nerves unwind, let oxygen return to his brain, felt his heart beating regularly again. Voldemort's ambition had made him blind, they were almost home free, all of the pieces were falling into place. He could almost feel the life flowing back into him. The Dark Mark always itched furiously in Voldemort's presence; he could just turn around and fly away, preferably very far away. "But there is still the matter of your lying to me." And there was searing pain.

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Thus far I've not really commented on any specific aspect of the story, despite my misgivings about certain things but… sometimes I just can't keep my mouth shut.

(1) About the Azrael's Mercy stuff… I'm sorry, no no, I really am. I have a tendency to be spectacularly bad at naming things and so you might have to forgive me for that. Azrael's mercy – pah. Also: this was not where I wanted to go with this story, I had plans entirely beyond what I actually wrote. Well, no, my initial plans were more along the lines of "Let's kill Cho so Harry has an excuse to go get it on with Draco!" but… it mutated. Horribly. Either way, I seem to have gone completely off track with what I was going to say here, but my profound apologies for this completely unoriginal and childish plot device.

You know the drill – review. Please oh please oh please. …That may have been more convincing if I didn't have such a damned headache.


	23. Mucus

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Harry Potter (novels, industry, products, movies, person, etc.) that honor belongs to Scholastic Books and JKRowling – clearly if I owned Harry Potter (again, novels, industry, products, movies, people, etc.) there would be a lot more porn.

**Author's Notes:** Sorry it took so bleedin' long to get to ya - I just wasn't feeling particularly motivated, and this chapter is hardly the apology one looks for after a brief hiatus. Not that anyone really reads it. This chapter is best defined as 'short and curious' there are a few transitions that make no sense whatsoever, but that's really quite all right because that (I think) was the point rather than a gross oversight on my part. Then again, I could be entirely incorrect, it's been that long since I wrote it. The title of the chapter itself should become self explanatory after a moment. Either way, you can find the entire, re-edited, uncut archive (this will include some more NC-17 scenes in later chapters) at Malf0y(underscore)M0nkeys. Come visit, if you give me feedback, I will bow and write you haikus (for fun. Of course).

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Chapter 23 Mucus

Harry sniffled and blinked groggily and shook his head to clear his vision, it was a bad idea. He had been spending far too much time in the dark and buried by library books in the long forgotten depths of the castle where he could be alone with his fervor, hiding from his friends in the dusty storage spaces he'd converted into reading rooms. His glasses no longer wanted to work and his throat felt like icy needles poised to thrust when he swallowed, instead they seemed to scream and that was so much worse. Harry blinked again and when his legs decided that they no longer wanted to hold him up, he found that waiting for Malfoy sitting down was just as good as waiting standing up. Harry vowed that he'd hex the bastard when he got here, if only for making him worry and wait in a freezing corridor that hadn't seemed so goddamned cold but five minutes ago.

He'd holed himself up in Hagrid's cabin all week because Hermione was becoming unbearable and the castle walls were closing in on him. Harry was hopeless at research – he'd tried, he really had, he spent three days reading Hogwarts: a History in Hagrid's kitchen, and while it yielded a variety of boring facts he could have asked Hermione about, there was nothing in the way of decent hiding places for magical items smaller than a three headed dog. Of course, it wouldn't just be in some happy corner, that was not how Dumbledore worked, it couldn't possibly be hidden away in a dusty cellar, it would be somewhere romantic, there would be a trial to get to it, and Harry could just spit because he knew that he would never find it without Dumbledore's explicit permission. No lost artifact, no coveted treasure, was ever behind the bourbon on the 3rd shelf, it was always in the Temple of Doom, or in the lost city Obscurity: Harry could only thank God that there were no damsels in distress.

There was something wrong. Well, to be fair, very rarely were things right, but this time there was something more wrong than before. The lights and sounds of Gryffindor common were too much to bear, everything made his eyes scream and his nose had not hurt so bad since Fred caught him with a stray bludger in third year. The fourth year boys valiantly testing the contents of the New and Improved Skiving Snack Boxes was agony as with a hot flash of light Alan McKinney swallowed "Charms Catastrophe 11" and grew chicken legs, a gimp wing, and a beak in a magnificent shade of puce.

His eyes burned and itched, somehow not attached to the sore pressure in his face – Harry's jaws felt as if they were being torn apart and clamped together in one go, which was nothing on his cold feet. There was something very wrong with this template. "When Ron died…" he said distantly, it was barely above a whisper. Hermione's habit of sitting beside him while she studied was not one she'd grown out of in recent months – somewhere deep in her subconscious mind there was no pregnant friend, there was no Malfoy, and Ron was in the hospital wing because of a prank. That horribly delusional too-well-hidden depth in his so-called friend made her head snap up eagerly. "I wasn't there."

And her head was down again, Harry's felt on fire. "Too right." She said.

Harry wasn't feeling rational, his body was cold, the blankets made his skin hurt, his head was hot, and Draco who was at the semi-monthly Death Eater Convention for the remainder of the evening was not there to cool it down with his icy fingertips when Harry banged his head against the desk, lost again and rereading ancient ideas of immortality. When his neck moved, his vision swam and surely his neck would have been a ribbon for the balloon that was his head had his throat not been screaming. "I wanted to be there." Harry said and forced a swallow, "I always thought it would be Ron and me forever and if one of us died… it was going to be me." Hot and irrational and cold and tired and headachey.

Hermione sniffed, "Well, I was there and it was nothing you'd want to see I'm sure."

She said finally and returned to her book so Harry could not see the glistening moisture in her eyes. His eyes, which were on lobster-like stems burned. "I really miss him Hermione. I was such an ass about Cho, and Sirius, and I don't feel good."

"Well it was your own damned fault for getting detention wasn't it?" all pretenses at not crying or concentrating on "Incredibly advanced and Mind Numbingly Dull Transfigurations," a continuation on the Miranda Goshawk series vanished as the book snapped shut. Harry's eyes watered in sympathy. "Silly us, we all assumed it was a good thing you hadn't died there with him."

Harry blinked, the pressure at his nose and eyebrows tingled: was Hermione running a fever too? Hot tears leaked from his crustacean eyes and sizzled away on his face as his hands came up to wipe them away. "I had to do something." He said thickly, and again his throat refused to swallow.

Harry sneezed and blinked into consciousness, ignoring the headache that settled between his eyes the moment he opened them – what a horrible thing to dream. Merlin he was tired. Any moment Malfoy would be rounding the corridor and they could fall back into their routine of thumbing mindlessly through the library and intermittently banging their heads against the wall. When he'd stumbled through the door the night before, Malfoy was in no shape to be of use, he was stammering, and quaking, and tired, so Harry went back to raking his mind for anything. "It has been destroyed." Dumbledore said, no clue about how, no real reason why especially now that Voldemort had his body back. Harry was so lost, and so tired, this wasn't like finding Nicholas Flammel, this was so much harder and all he wanted was a little peace.

"It's no use." Malfoy said, striding along the hall, and Harry scowled. Nothing was ever of use, but people did it anyway – the world really had no cause for the television, but some silly bugger invented it anyway. There was no cause to research new medicines, but people did it anyway. There was really no use for the world, and it existed anyway, so Malfoy's pessimism could go hang. "Do you suppose, since Weasley's still such an awful Keeper, that you'll be letting him back on the field?"

"What?" Harry was confused and his head hurt because there was something wrong with his ears. A muzzy, buzzing sensation that started in around his nose and worked its way back until his whole body seemed to be humming an inconsistent tune, and his mind swam. Draco repeated the question. "Don't you see you're totally reliant on pineapples? You'll never find it."

"I don't understand…"

"Harry if you don't wake up I'm going to smack you." That was an ultimatum that he at least understood, or would if he had been sleeping which he didn't seem to be. He shook his head, which only made the buzzing worse, and something gummy slid down his throat making him gag. "If you had four feet, you'd make more sense." A very large bee stung his cheek.

"Ow." Harry shook himself awake and Malfoy was standing just above him, looking a little queasy and a little closer to dead than he had been a week ago. It was very strange, seeing him die slowly like this, he'd never had the chance to really see a person die over time, it was always so abrupt, always such a distinct transition from alive and well to waxy dead, from there to rotting. "What was…?" His voice emerged as a croak and Harry tried to swallow whatever was blocking it until he began coughing violently. Malfoy sat down.

"Potter, how long have you been sleeping in a corridor?"

Harry was awake now, and miserable. Breathing was impossible, his throat was dry, he felt like he'd been run over by a very large toad on a bicycle, and every inch of him was sore, even his armpits hurt to exist. It had been a very long time since Harry Potter had a bad cold, it was a blessing of his childhood that his innate magic had helped achieve; if Harry had sniffled as a child his Aunt Petunia would have a serious complaint against magical boogies. He was definitely sniffling now, and felt very odd, like half of him was missing, like he couldn't perform a luminous charm. "I will!"

"You will what?" Malfoy had him by the shoulders, he wasn't quite shaking him but it was a distinctly possible future.

Harry wanted to say 'don't do that! I don't feel good you vindictive ponce,' but his vehement if inarticulate protest came out as a groggy "Nuh…" And he made an effort, oh his neck hurt, and he was cold, and uncomfortable, and just wanted to go back to sleep, why was Malfoy attacking him like this? "I will find the… pineapple." He said firmly, distinctly aware of the flagstones beneath as he suddenly realized what he'd said – no sinking through the floor in shame then. "I… I was… dreaming? I don' know how long I' been asleep."

"That, I should think, was obvious." Malfoy rolled his eyes and sat back. He was all too familiar with Harry's after-nap grogginess, there was the initial pause where he reassured himself that he was indeed Harry Potter, the secondary confusion where he was trying to shake off the latest idiocy his mind concocted, and finally the general crawl-home-drunk question 'Why am I laying behind a statue wearing only one sock?' It rarely took this long, however. "Awake now?"

"Er… yes."

Draco was aware of the lighting, he was aware of the occasional twitch in his right foot due to temporary nerve damage, he was also aware that he wasn't the only one that was a little too pale to be blamed entirely on dim torches and it filled him with a sort of frustrated jealousy. What right did Potter have to be sick, what right did he have to be in need of help when Draco himself was about to fall over dead. "Potter, are you alright?"

Harry nodded slowly, he wasn't feeling well, but it didn't matter. He would be fine once they got to work. If he could just focus… then maybe his skin would stop hurting, and maybe if he made a great show of being in pain and of being frustrated Malfoy would rub his neck again in that absent minded sort of sympathy. That would be nice. "Yeah."

"No you're not."

"Don't ask dumb questions if you already know the answer." Harry grumbled irritably, and started coughing again. "I was… waiting."

"When was the last time you slept?"

"Uhm… just now?"

Malfoy rolled his eyes again and gave Harry a critical look which the Gryffindor tried and failed to return, "Fair enough. When was the last time you ate?"

"Uhm?"

Draco lost his patience. He'd endured varying levels of agony and had broken his own ankle thrashing for an outlet last night so that this idiot could do what? Forget to take care of himself? Drop dead of exhaustion before Voldemort could lay a hand on him? Or maybe force the school to take an interest by landing himself in the infirmary? They had agreed not to do anything stupid, to not call attention to themselves, to work in secret very much in the eye of the public, Potter was being a twat. "Merlin's Balls Potter! Do I have to spoon feed you and tuck you in bed at night? Are you a toddler?"

"Yes Malfoy, I am a toddler." It was said with a level of sarcasm that poured straight through sardonicism and into sincerity, Malfoy snorted. Harry peeled himself off the floor and stood with one shoulder against the wall, leaning heavily on it for support, "Are we going to the library or not?"

"No." Malfoy was up too and limping slightly as he pushed Harry down the corridor and led him to the East end of the castle and up to Gryffindor. "You are going to bed."

"Then we won't find the stone!" Harry knew somewhere in his mind that this statement sounded ridiculous – but that little rationale was severely tempered by the fever stirring behind his eyes, and he pressed on. "What if we never find it? We can't kill him without it, we have to find it! Don't you understand we have to or Ron will die! No no, you will die! He'll kill you if you keep him waiting too long, don't you understand, we have to find it or he'll make you go crazy and you won't be here and everyone will die! You'll die!" This self committed idiocy and ultimate infraction against sanity stopped his inane babble and Harry buried his face in his hands, rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses and praying to whatever kind deity existed to put him out of his misery. "Oh god Draco, I've completely lost the plot."

"Ages ago." Stupid and frustrating though he was, Draco couldn't help but laugh at Harry's half-sleeping paranoia as Harry pulled himself up, too-skinny arms fell across his shoulders like deadweight. With a genial voice and far more helpful than he was feeling: "It's bed or Madam Pomfrey, so shut up Potter."

Harry took the advice; he could feel himself slipping into hysteria, drowning in a fog of itchy discomfort and he didn't appreciate it. His head felt like it was floating some two feet above his body as Malfoy pushed him up the stairs and towards the portrait of the fat lady. He couldn't exactly recall ever telling Malfoy the way to the tower, and made a vague protest on the subject, but it didn't seem to matter, somewhere at the top of all those stairs was a bed with his name on it.

"You are not the only one who has a decent map of the school." Said Malfoy in response to his indignant mumbling, and before Harry could wheeze out a demand, Draco supplied him with, "And -you're not the only one who can use a listen-in charm. Certain people have been… keeping an eye on you. Refurbishment…" The portrait swung open and they made their way quietly but need not have bothered, the common room was empty, cluttered with the detritus of carefree students, unfinished homework, empty ink bottles, the remnants of exploding snap cards, even an innocently placed packet of ton-tongue-toffee's on a coffee table. Gryffindor had a very communist approach to candy that was left sitting out.

It hardly mattered that Malfoy was standing by the portrait hole with a look of unfamiliar discomfort; Harry practically fell into a chair and was up again seconds later to blow his nose. "Tomorrow's Monday." Harry nodded, "Meet me before potions; I have something to show you."

With a tissue pressed firmly against his nose, Harry's answer was almost incomprehensible when it finally came. "Ugh. Mebbe we shuld jus poisin me," there was a wet chuckle, "tink dat would kill 'im?"

"Go to bed Potter."

Malfoy let himself out.

* * *

Argus Filch sighed in the quiet dark of Hogwarts as he prepared for the Easter Holiday. He was quite aware of the goings on at Hogwarts Castle, and though he knew of every late night rendezvous, every happy trip to the kitchens for a midnight snack, it was hardly worth the effort of punishment these days. Did he know that Francine Burgeon and Arnold Sweeney were 'stepping out' in the partially hidden corridor on the fourth floor? Oh yes. Did he know that every night someone occupied the library well after hours? Oh yes, he knew, and he cared very little.

No one had set off a dungbomb in months. Even the first years who were new to the rules and rituals at Hogwarts had studiously refrained from pranking in the heavy atmosphere and under the solemn guises of their upperclassmen. His life was very dull indeed these days. Even Peeves had done nothing more harmful than pelting people with half-chewed peanuts. It was as though the poltergeist had been simply going through the motions; his heart wasn't in it and one night he could be heard confessing to the grey lady that he in-fact missed the Weasley Twins. If Argus had his way, the entire school would be a clean, upstanding bunch of adults instead of miscreant students, hell bent on highlighting his deficiencies.

But this… the students weren't clean, upstanding, or particularly mature, they were simply… very dull. There was a spark that wasn't there anymore, Quidditch was gone, Hogsmeade visits were gone, they were being escorted from their classes and back to their dorm rooms at the end of every meal for their safety, because if the Death Eaters could attack in Hogsmeade, they could attack the school. The only reason Hogwarts was open was because of Albus Dumbledore, there had been serious consideration in the ministry of shutting Hogwarts down and allowing students to spend the time with their families, because Voldemort's activity had been soaring at record highs, and there was nary a witch or wizard left that was unattached to an attack in some way. "Why, just last week my Great Aunt Ethel was found in her house with the dark mark over her chimney. Poor dear, and all because of the flying teapots…"

All month the worst thing he'd had to scrub from the halls was the result of a badly aimed Scurvy hex that hit a portrait of a nun. The woman had cried a bit, and he repaired her with hardly an effort. Filch was a firm supporter of corporal punishment, but the most effective form it seemed was fear, and weariness. Only a very few of the new muggle-borns were unaware of the situation, and the ice had yet to tingle down their spine with the whispers of 'you know who'. People were afraid for their families. Just last week Professor Blirghty had taken a flying leap on to a broom and jetted to his ancestral home for the funeral of his cousin Emanuel, who had been caught in a rather unpleasant floo collapse courtesy of Voldemort which had shut down the network indefinitely.

Filch coughed and stumped up a flight of stairs, the luminous eyes of his cat floating behind him. There was only so much boredom a man could take, and if someone didn't set off some Filibusters in the pudding soon, he would be a very unhappy man.

* * *

End of Chapter – yeah, don't know where I was going with that one. Filch, I think, is more of a 'view of the people' sort of thing – though it's a bit of an odd view. 


	24. Hating Harry Potter

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Harry Potter (novels, industry, products, movies, person, etc.) that honor belongs to Scholastic Books and JKRowling – clearly if I owned Harry Potter (again, novels, industry, products, movies, people, etc.) there would be a lot more porn.

**Author's Notes: **I feel like this chapter and the previous one are somewhat lacking in essential pieces. They feel to me like the middle of a long television series wherein the creators have to re-cap the entire situation for people – and yet, there are some rather important plot devices in this particular chapter (or so I think upon the scan I did before posting this sucker. Either way, you can find the entire, re-edited, uncut archive (this will include some more NC-17 scenes in later chapters) at Malf0yM0nkeys. Come visit, if you give me feedback, I will bow and write you haikus (for fun. Of course).

**Special Thanks To: **

**Ludra: **Okay, so I didn't update as fast as I possibly could... but I did remember, and thank you so much for reviewing - I love to know that people (probably in spite of themselves) are still reading. So thank you, and hey - at least it's not 'Mucus' that's being dedicated to you.

* * *

Chapter 24 Hating Harry Potter

"Kill the spare." The miasma of mist and fog swirled around him, laughing cruelly as his head split in two. The world was black, and grey, and nowhere, but this was all so familiar to him that Harry squirmed out of instinct. He was completely surrounded by kowtowing sycophants; he could see them all through their masks. There was Lucius Malfoy, there was Professor Quirrel, there was Dudley Dursley and the West Ham soccer team. Professor Snape stood among them, refusing to bow, Bellatrix Lestrange had her forehead pressed against the grass – she was wailing. Draco Malfoy stood opposite him, atop a hill that faded black against the murky grey, yet he was remarkably clear, and pale. Harry couldn't breathe and he couldn't imagine a world where he could.

"Do you see them young Potter?" said someone, Theodore Nott groveled at his feet, Wormtail basked in his master's attentions. "Do you see how well they dance? I have their souls. I have their very magic in my hand!"

"Bones of the father," the assembled company chanted around him, "unknowingly given, you will renew your son!"

They moved, emerging from their places of worship like new-born saints, "Flesh of the servant, willingly given," the pain in his skull was growing, he could feel it in his teeth, waiting for its moment to explode. "You will revive your master!"

Harry cried as his head burst open like rotten fruit, "Blood of the enemy, forcibly taken," every pore was leaking sweat and blood, his bones broke, his stomach seethed, his mind vanished from the worldless place. "You will resurrect your foe!"

"Thank you Harry Potter!"

"HARRY!" With great effort, he turned, there was no body, there was only the pain in his head, which wasn't there. "Harry, you've got to put my soul back in my body!" Said Cedric, and Harry screamed.

"Harry mate," Dean said from the bed nearest the door as the collective dorm groaned and rolled over in the early-morning light. "You gotta stop wakin' us up like that."

Harry sat up and took stock of his surroundings, another dream, and at the same time just another variation of the same Cedric nightmare. His searing headache had settled for a dull throb across his temples and he groaned around a stuffed nose. "Sorry," He said, and wished he understood what it meant.

* * *

Marjorie stared quietly into the light outside the window. It was a beautiful day in late March, the afternoon rain showers kept the grass green, and the air fresh. Light filtered in through the windows and the hall rang with the sounds of amused students as they charmed trousers into washing and folding themselves. Professor Flitwick had even gone to the trouble of charming a pair of black slacks into dancing the can-can for the assembled class. None of which explained why she currently felt like jumping out the window. How had everything gone so wrong?

Her mother and father hadn't had much to say on the subject. They hadn't disowned her, they hadn't even yelled – there was just an overwhelming sense of disappointment screaming out of their occasional letters. Yesterday, Ernie McMillan had stared at her in a puzzled sort of way as though seeing her for the first time, and she hadn't asked him why. She couldn't stand it; she'd tried so hard to be happy for Hermione's sake, because she was so sad lately. It was all because of Ron of course, they'd giggled since, and shared jokes since, and even convinced Ginny Weasley into having a good time with them, but Hermione hadn't really been the same sense. She was there, she was there in so many ways, there when Marjorie had strange cravings, there when she needed a shoulder to cry on, there with her when she hadn't gone home for Easter for the first time in six years, but a tiny little light had gone off in her eyes, and though Marjorie knew it wasn't for her, she missed it all the same.

And of course this was Harry's fault. Hermione needed her friends, she needed Ron to make her angry and make her laugh in the same breath, she needed Harry to berate and to be the go between, and to balance her out against Ron's never ending boyishness. Failing that Hermione at least needed someone who would understand her, someone she could depend up on to tease her for her constant bookishness, and Marjorie needed Hermione. She had a personal stock. Her best friend was an only child, and it was so simple for Marjorie to fade into the woodwork of Hermione's loneliness, Harry wasn't helping.

He'd hurt her, the absolute rejection of her concern had hurt Hermione deeply; it wasn't her fault he was a bloody idiot. And that was where the problem started of course. He used to be so nice to her, or at least Harry hadn't acted like the whole world was a festering corpse full of brainless maggots. Marjorie Hated Harry Potter - because she Loved Hermione Granger, as a friend, as a confidant, as a sister, and as so much more. Everything had gone wrong.

That morning in September she had been so sick at heart, a baby. She couldn't be having a baby, she _was _a baby, she wasn't ready for it, she couldn't handle the responsibility, she couldn't handle the heart ache of loving something that much. Marjorie hadn't meant to tell anyone, she was just going to have the problem quietly handled, and maybe there would be a little stain on her soul, and maybe she'd never be able to look her mother in the face again, but she wouldn't be saddled with the responsibility of a child, and she wouldn't suffer the unending scorn of her classmates and her family. She never could have done this. And then there was Hermione, who refused to let her get away without a helping hand. Hermione, who had looked up the health and safety statistics about both muggle and wizard abortions, Hermione who'd helped her weigh her options, who discussed the best course of action, who saw her well into her third term with hardly a wince as Marjorie constantly complained about her itching belly, and her swollen feet, and the tiny elbow in her bladder.

Without Hermione, she would fit happily behind this desk, and her family wouldn't be so shell shocked, and she never would have learned what a bastard her boyfriend was, or exactly how happy the kick of a tiny foot could make her. She wouldn't love her so much, and Marjorie wouldn't be so confused, and she could spend the rest of her days with superficial friends and in happy ignorance. Hermione was an education. And she wouldn't hate Harry Potter.

It was a simple swish of her wand that folded her experimental trousers and flung them quite vindictively against Harry's spiky head. "Whoops!" She said to the class at large, and they had laughed.

* * *

He'd got it. It was a perfect, glowing piece of someone's soul, and it rested quite comfortably in his hand emitting gentle warmth. There was no spell for what he'd meant to do – there very rarely was. The best part of his education, in fact, was learning that the spells seldom mattered; only the intent with which the magic was wielded actually formed the spell. It was like the difference between an engineer and a new driver learning to pump gas – there was blind use of magic, and then the true knowledge of what magic could do when not confined by words. Voldemort knew the value of both.

Voldemort had found it, touched it, attached a thread of his magic to the core in his hand, it was power. There were no spells for what he meant to do, only sublime thought. He had been foolish to think that the core was anatomical. Foolish to think it was anything at all beyond theory, because in his head floated the semisolid gel of a magical core. He would have to replace it soon, the witch it belonged to was dying; her life force was desperately trying to compensate for her missing magic, and was failing. It had been such a simple thing to find once he knew where to look.

To strip a person down to their essential parts you had what, skin, muscles, nerves, bones, organs, a 'self' and… something more. It was silly to think that hidden amongst the squelching inelegant body mass was something operated by the spirit. He did in fact discover the core next to the heart, but only in the sense that hearts are more than the organs that begin the cardiovascular system. And there, molded onto that flimsy and evasive thing that was a soul was the core, sparking and fizzing against the magic he'd used to find it. There was a soul in his hand, connected to his magic through a strand finer than gossamer, and more delicate than a spider's web. An actual soul…

For a moment Lord Voldemort had allowed himself to become lost in the possibilities. An entire world at his command, a new avenue of magic, an expendable force before his own, somewhere safe to keep himself if he needed to be resurrected once more: immortality. The possibilities were endless, he would never die, moving from one core to the next until time was exhausted chasing him. The power, the pure unadulterated force that thrummed through him – he could access her magic now, he could feel it as purple sparkles where his resided, it rushed through his veins, filled his mind with scenes of glory. The POWER!

There was a storm coming, and this time he would be prepared. He had underestimated the enemy; he never could have assumed that a small child, protected by something so quaint and rustic as a sacrifice had brought him to his knees. He knew better now, he was prepared, he had the power of soul and sacrifice at his hands to guard him against Dumbledore and whatever armies he could muster. The half-breeds were useless to him now, their strength was a pittance against the power he directed, Dumbledore could have them, and for a moment, Voldemort could feel the cold laughter of victory that rang around his laboratory.

The alarm rang violently clanging a counter-beat to his mirth. The body of the witch began to thrash in its last efforts to stay alive, and Voldemort released his hold on her magic, sending her living soul back where it belonged for use at his convenience. "Can you feel it?" He hissed towards her.

"Yes Master. Yes I feel your magic… oh thank you master!" Bellatrix Lestrange was many things; among them a servant who'd failed him. Yet she was loyal, piteously loyal, and lusted for his power. Husbands and wives had no significance here – Rudolfus Lestrange had married a strong woman, his ambition had only fueled hers, and they had both found a level of excitement and arousal in Voldemort's mere presence. Megalomania had it usefulness, and the Lestrange's knew their place in his circle. "Oh thank you master!"

* * *

Everyone loves a good sycophant, don't they? 


	25. Displacement

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Harry Potter (novels, industry, products, movies, person, etc.) that honor belongs to Scholastic Books and JKRowling – clearly if I owned Harry Potter (again, novels, industry, products, movies, people, etc.) there would be a lot more porn.

**Author's Notes: **Blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah: blah blah. Yeeeah, I'm really good at this whole notes thing aren't I? There's some Slytherin Snarkiness, some Emotional Blackmail, and well… more cattiness, warnings for mild Ginny bashing, though when I say mild I mean vanilla. And yeah – that thing about horse manure, yeah, that's true. I'm not a huge fan of the first segment in this chapter, but what can I say, I really enjoy using the word Acoustics, and teasing the Slytherins - they're fun to rile. Either way, you can find the entire, re-edited, uncut archive (this will include some more NC-17 scenes in later chapters) at Malf0yM0nkeys. Come visit, if you give me feedback, I will bow and write you haikus (for fun. Of course).

**Special Thanks To: **

**PaddycakePadfoot** – Thank you! First off, just: thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you. "You are the blossom / that makes beautiful the world / of banality". I did promise haikus, and thank you so very deeply. That was one _heck _of a review – the fact that I actually had to scroll down the page made me gleeful (there was actual glee). I think you've satiated my hubris for a whole month, and I'm… just so happy. Happy about everything you wrote really, but especially that you could see Ron as the catalyst for change; I was hoping to get that across but I wasn't sure that anyone was reading, or would understand, or for that matter could get through my ridiculously thick prose. I'm also very relieved that somebody (finally) mentioned liking Draco – it's Harry that I found a strain to write, but never having been born a British aristocrat from a very snobby and possibly inbred family I may have let some of my middle-class slip in and it's been worrying, but I'm relieved to note that his snarkiness won out.

As to your question of why this hasn't garnered more replies? I have absolutely no idea – missed the band wagon I suppose, but your review is clearly worth at least seven 'Loved it's, and therefore most definitely worthy of comment. I was so thrilled to open the review letter, so happy in fact, that you've inspired me to post yet another chapter that, hopefully, will live up to your extraordinary praise – no pressure then. Thank you again, and I hope (with all that my little withered heart contains) that you like this next bit.

* * *

Chapter 25: Displacement

The Slytherin dorms were cool, acoustic, footsteps and whispered conversations carried to unexpected corners, and one felt that at any moment things had the potential to become incredibly damp. Harry Potter had nearly taken up residence in the gothic surroundings, and like most things between Gryffindor and Slytherin, the problem started there. It wasn't so much the Slytherin Dorms, or even that Harry was in them so much as the fact that he'd insinuated himself there, he was comfortable there, he was sitting on the plush leather couch drinking a butter beer and reviewing his homework notes in solitude when Blaise Zabini decided he didn't like it. "What are you doing here Potter?"

"Managing to entertain me Zabini," Malfoy's voice floated from across the room, they were nowhere near each other, not even facing each other, the blonde looked perfectly absorbed by his book, and yet he spoke calmly and with authority as though he knew more than anyone else in the room – and by all accounts he did. Harry was fascinated by the Slytherin habit of surnames and their almost vulgar pretentiousness – everything was so serious and Harry rolled his eyes at the drama of the situation. "Don't be a bore."

"Are you sure that he can be trusted?" Blaise asked tersely, though not above a whisper, and Harry had to laugh. His weren't the only housemates concerned for political affiliations; so worried for their precious agendas when they made little difference. In the course of a war few people did matter and Harry could only pray that he would. He had just thought of Hermione as nothing more than a housemate.

"Does it really matter?" He said archly, and deigned to explain himself. It was something this room did, gave you a cool sense of superiority, there was something very restful about knowing you were the best person in the room. "Do you really have the authority to second guess your master?"

"I wasn't talking to you Potter." Was the lightning fast response, he neither refuted nor acknowledged the claim, but Harry knew better than anyone the Death Eaters in the school. He'd done his homework, he'd protected himself, he'd assimilated all of the information necessary to stage a Hogwarts Coup with his own people or Voldemort's, and he'd thrown caution to the winds by trusting Malfoy because his information was redundant. If Zabini didn't trust him that was his problem, and in perfect honesty, the boy couldn't have been as stupid as he looked. "And if I were, Potter, I'd like to point out that you have given us no reason to trust you."

"That's unfortunate," said Harry, and somewhere behind him he could hear Draco hiss, "because you've more or less announced your loyalties right in front of me, and were I not trustworthy I could happily let something… slip. To think, you could end up in Azkaban, surrounded by armed guards, and you'd have your mouth to thank because trials of the Wizengamot are reserved for people with a bit more clout than _you_." Zabini glowered, and Harry sat on the urge to crow triumphantly, threatening a Slytherin was like walking barefoot on hot coals, you didn't do it unless you knew it wouldn't burn. "Or I could be a reliable asset, and you could simply be a bit of an idiot instead of a felon. So tell me Zabini, which do you think I am?" At which point Draco had decided that Harry should leave well enough alone and only a strong sense of decorum kept him from bodily hauling the Gryffindor out of his common room.

* * *

The lights in the great hall were dim, and dull light still shone through the enchanted ceiling even at this hour, signifying the imminent approach of summer. Dinner was in full swing as students bolted down serving after serving of pasta heaped generously with thick meat sauce. Harry Potter's stomach groaned in protest halfway through his second plate. He was fit to burst long before the clock reached 'dessert', and was sorely considering leaving. It was always a feast, people were always happy and cheerful, and there was always some sort of fruit tart, or chocolate confection waiting at the end of every immensely satisfying meal because Hogwarts never did anything without a feast.

Food was never like this at Number Four, Privet Drive, meals tended to be an ordeal punctuated by disapproving comments from his uncle and blatant favoritism by his aunt; said meals were recently made more tragic by Dudley's endless dieting. Harry had come to enjoy his meals at Hogwarts, he'd come to love the sensation of fullness that he'd never quite reached at Privet Drive, he'd come to love the laughing company and the imperfect table manners of his fellow Gryffindors, laughing with them as one of the Weasley twins belched a rendition of the 1812 symphony. Thoughts of Privet Drive were now tempered liberally with the glowing idea of never having to return, and twisted fear of that happiness. Voldemort had actually done him a favor, and Harry wasn't considering the guilty ramifications of his happiness. At least the food was still good.

The Gryffindors had ostracized him completely. His apparently rude dismissal of his former friends had left them angry and hostile towards him, and though still civil in the hallways and in classes, Harry was completely and happily ignored in close quarters. He slept in the far bed, he ate alone, he sat surrounded by other houses in classes, and he thought longingly of the time when this would be over and he could openly mock them for their idiocy. Once this was over – it wouldn't matter much, he would be dead either way, but the Gryffindor tendency towards guilt and masochism would do his work for him. There was no happy company, no raucous laughter denoting some fabulous joke, and certainly no Weasleys still inclined to belch, but at least the food was still good.

It was a surprise when groaning for mercy from his over-full stomach he realized that someone was sitting beside him in quiet contemplation. "We need to talk." Said Ginny Weasley and Harry blinked in confusion. There was no one within three feet of them, the entire Gryffindor House having squashed together in order to avoid his end of the table. Harry couldn't fathom a reason for Ginny, or any Weasley wanting to associate on any level, let alone a verbal one, and said as much. "Well, I fancy you don't I?" She said in a voice so matter-of-fact Harry had to stare.

"Do you?"

"It's what Ron would've wanted." She said instead of answering him, and Harry frowned. He wanted to ask her if she fancied him because she fancied him, or if she fancied him because Ron would approve, but he didn't. Instead he continued to stare at her in the fading light and she squirmed. Ginny was a bit like her brothers, and a bit like her father in appearance, a wider jaw than a girl should have had, and wider shoulders, she wasn't unattractive in a slightly unfeminine way, but Harry didn't think of that. He thought instead of Ron, and how he'd ruthlessly mocked his little sister for having such a crush in their second year, and of all the trouble she'd gotten them both in, and of Gilderoy Lockheart still in the St. Mungo's Ward and now having learned to make joined up letters, re-learning how to perform cheering charms, and of Dean Thomas and how miserable he'd been for no apparent reason. Harry thought of all the Weasleys and their happy acceptance of him into the family, and the nightmarish bundle that she seemed to represent – this wasn't a girl, this was an amalgamation of a surrogate family. She squirmed further. "And I know that you've been… suffering but Harry we can get you some help!"

Harry's disgust must have been evident on his face because her chocolatey brown eyes, so much like Percy's were filled with a hopeful pity. He wanted to ask her who she thought she was, and he wanted to tell her how revolting this whole scenario was, how the spaghetti in his stomach was churning, and how he'd love nothing more than to vomit on her shoes. All that came out was, "No." no, he would absolutely not be seeking her aid, nor her companionship for the rest of eternity, and he would absolutely not be returning to that vile expression. "You're out of your mind." Said Ron's best friend, and abandoned the table before the chocolate mousse.

* * *

Once out in the air, the world seemed so much clearer than it ever had before. The Quidditch pitch was fresh and green, it practically breathed spring life, birds twittered, ants made their merry way from picnic to hill and back, Hagrid's indomitable garden was practically spring-loaded with flowers and coiling vines. Harry Potter was not a happy young man. This clear and crystal spring thought was not a happy one – there was no Philosopher's Stone. He and Malfoy had a potion, they had incentive, they had the blinding need to meet with Voldemort before the world fell down around their ears, and they had nothing but a dead end to get them there.

The pitch was overgrown with disuse, the students hadn't been allowed out on to it in the months since February, and even the Quidditch gear seemed lonely as Harry handled it reverently his first flight in months. They weren't supposed to be out here – they weren't supposed to be a lot of things, but Harry's recent philosophy ran the lines of 'what good have the rules ever done?' He sighed and the flame of hope dampened, "We're never going to find the stone Malfoy." Was all he said, and he said it to the world at large because the trees seemed to hear it and the silence it perpetuated was deafening. It wasn't as much of a tragedy as he would have liked, and if Draco's reaction was anything to go by, he'd been expecting it too.

In the hearty afternoon light that filtered through the clouds, the Slytherin looked healthy, and Harry hated himself for resenting that fact. If Drama had its way, he would have been gaunt, he would have been horribly pale and the sound of dying ambition should have echoed across the castle grounds like a thunder shot, or possibly an earthquake – but drama rarely had its way. There weren't enough rainy days for cast-over funerals, there weren't enough malicious families to produce tortured lovers for every valiant hero, and not everyone found themselves staring a riddle in the face when they desperately needed one. This was one of the many times that Drama was denied, Malfoy stood before him with a hand resting against his Nimbus 2001, and Harry felt a bit like laughing.

"Yeah," Said Draco, and it was a sign of how awful things really were, because Malfoy never said 'yeah'. "I know. But what can we do?" It was stubbornness at it's most basic; the world could fall down, the school could crumble, society could fragment into a million shocked little pieces and they would still look, because there was nothing else. Harry couldn't justify it, couldn't put the words into place, but somewhere between his stomach and his heart lay the undeniable feeling that if he stopped, if he just gave up trying… then that was it. He was insane and could feel it bubbling out of him like pus squeezed from a boil, he was insane, Malfoy was insane with him, driven, and without the attempt, without doing something he would lose his mind as well. Which also made him feel like laughing; he was right back at semantics where he'd started.

"Exactly. What else can we do?" Draco shrugged, and Harry muttered something in frustration. He wasn't adverse to change, if there was something he could do, something that could work for them, he would do everything in his power to facilitate it, but the plan couldn't die. Admittedly 'everything in his power' was quite possibly began and ended with begging the fates for a solution and pitying himself in the meantime, but one day something would emerge that would help him find what he was looking for if he didn't snap and go on a homicidal rampage first.

Voldemort would be expecting him, he needed the stone, he wanted it so badly he could taste it, and yet there was nothing. Not a clue, or a whisper of its existence, and Harry was genuinely afraid, he relied so heavily on being able to find it – it hadn't occurred to him just how dead he would be if he didn't. It had, however, occurred to him that Voldemort wanted his company simply to cut him down where he stood, but he was counting on Voldemort's pride to keep him alive for a few precious moments, to humor his victim before deciding to kill him. A few precious moments where he needed the stone more than anything, and Harry didn't have it. "Is there any way we could make our own?"

"Don't you ever pay attention Potter?"

Harry rolled his eyes and fiddled with the snitch between his fingertips, Malfoy had a tendency to ask the stupidest questions at the worst time and he never knew whether to laugh or hate himself. Yes he paid attention, yes he knew that the stone had never been recreated, yes he knew it was a singular phenomena, and yes he knew that more accomplished wizards than him had tried it, but he was damned if he wasn't going to give it a try. "No."

"Harry!" It wasn't necessarily the fact that Malfoy lost his temper, because he did that quite frequently, and it wasn't because he elicited an outburst of such impotent frustration, but simply because Draco's hands cramped at his sides and his eyebrows twitched that Harry lost it. He couldn't help himself, he really couldn't. The whole scenario was just so ridiculous that Harry laughed until he had tears in his eyes and laughed harder still when Malfoy looked about to storm off.

He had managed to convince Voldemort that he was going to the Death Eaters, and he knew in the pit of his stomach that Voldemort only wanted an audience so that he could kill him for being a general nuisance. He also knew that Voldemort probably realized this about him, and they would have to be polite to each other for the sake of temporary politics. Possibly the worst of all, he was using Draco Malfoy as a go-between. It was just so hysterically funny, his great plan, his preemptive attempt to save his ass once again was failing simply because he was making an effort, and Harry just couldn't stop laughing. They didn't have the stone, and they never would. It was the one thing he absolutely needed to succeed, the one thing he could conceivably give Voldemort, and the one thing Voldemort's greed would allow him to take – and he didn't have it. Harry just couldn't let the hilarity go, and he was no longer sure if he was laughing, or crying in an amusingly loud way.

Malfoy was trying to explain something so he got himself under control, wiping his eyes and excusing his sore stomach muscles for the sudden activity. "I know, I know, I'm sorry," he said, and snorted, though managed to keep the hysteria at bay. "Never been reproduced, secret's never been shared, I got it, but… I don't see why we shouldn't try."

"Because Potter, I don't have two hundred years to sit around and wait while horse manure and cheap wine boil down to a semi-explosive sludge that _might_ produce tin and a cure for constipation." It was said with spite, a kind that hadn't really been seen since they're unorthodox truce, Harry was thrilled, so much of Malfoy was in his sardonicism, and so much of that rancor had been quashed. There was just something about the day, something in the air that was allowing him to laugh, to be angry, something about the way Malfoy was scowling at him that he found irresistible. "Or maybe you think the Dark Lord is going to wait for your convenience, his patience is limited Harry."

It wasn't masochism, he wasn't deliberately trying to frustrate Draco, but something inside of him had cracked, and he felt strangely liberated. Yes, Voldemort would lose his patience, Voldemort would demand his presence, Voldemort would kill him, and it was such a certainty he could almost forgive himself for not trying. Dylan Thomas in all his morbid fear of death could rage, and go not gently, but Harry Potter was exhausted – it was a relief. A manic light-headedness improved only by the withering scorn and Quidditch successes that Malfoy seemed to provide in spades, because when he took himself seriously he would forget the irony, and the good humor; he would be alone, and useless, and nowhere again. "So what do you propose we do?" He said, and it seemed so inadequate for the question.

Draco scowled, frowning more in contemplation than at Harry. Somewhere deeply hidden within Harry Potter was a grain of insanity, it resided in his stubbornness, his willingness to dive, in his unerring ability to push the buttons of all the wrong people and set the press on its ears. Somewhere in Harry Potter was a madman waiting to consume him, and Draco couldn't be bothered to prevent it because he was just as dead, and just as acerbic. "I don't know Harry," He said sarcastically, "but I hear he's partial to lemon tarts."

This time Malfoy joined in the hysteric laughter.

* * *

I promise, absolutely, that there will be a bit of story soon. 


	26. Desideratum

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Harry Potter (novels, industry, products, movies, person, etc.) that honor belongs to Scholastic Books and JKRowling – clearly if I owned Harry Potter (again, novels, industry, products, movies, people, etc.) there would be a lot more porn.

**Author's Notes: **For the Marjorie fans out there, not that there are any, probably, but I like her as an original character in a (fortunately) non Mary Sue way: sorry, tangent. For the Marjorie fans out there, this is your chapter. A little more insight into our girl, and well… the title says it all really "Desideratum" – Desire. This is maybe my favorite chapter, it's sad, and it's a little distracted, and it took me forever to move on from this point, but I got back to the original ambition of telling the story from other points of view with this one – so I'm really happy with it. The Davies show up, and although I'm not a huge fan of the Harry/Draco segment (it feels a little… repetitive until you get to the good stuff) we have our first encounter with NC-17 (i.e. aforementioned good stuff): joy. Naturally, I've edited SEVERELY for this archive and so none of the actual NC-17 stuff is in here, shortening the chapter severely, it remains to this point a PG-13. You can find the entire, re-edited, uncut archive (this will include some more NC-17 scenes in later chapters) at Malf0yM0nkeys. Come visit, if you give me feedback I will dance the dance of the truly happy and hum the tune of righteous glee (for fun. Of course).

**Special Thanks To: **

**IheartPineapple: **I'm sorry I made you cry… though I seem to get that response a lot from this story. I'm also exceedingly grateful that you took the time to review – you've no idea how much that brightens up my day, but most of all I'm glad you're enjoying the story. The way I killed Ron, I thought it was a bit… abrupt, I was hoping people wouldn't necessarily _realize _it until a few seconds after they read it – funnily enough I deliberated for months (no, really… I'm the queen of the stall tactic) over that particular scene and I'm really happy that you commented on it. Thank you ("A heartfelt thank you / in a swiftly turning world / for your precious time" - er, haiku as promised, and not as facetious as it sounded) so very much, and I hope I'll be hearing from you again.

**PaddycakePadfoot: **There was so much to that review that I don't even know where to start, but I suppose I should begin with and obvious and very much sincere: THANK YOU! Once again you flatter me – actually, you prompted me to ping the best friend and brag about your review – and once again I am overcome with embarrassed glee. I'm glad you think I've got the stuff to make it as a professional author – one day, maybe, if I get my brain to start working in terms of stories and how the humans interact in them I'll publish – in the mean time we settle for the delightfully disconnected fanfiction. When I'm writing I always feel very surrealist, as though the characters and the story are happening independently of each other, and hopefully I'll be able to cure myself of it, but I'm happy you're enjoying it nonetheless. I'm so… (I don't know what the word is, and I keep repeating myself which makes me feel as though I'm cheapening the sentiment, but really it's just for emphasis…) delighted that you're picking up on all of the things that I wanted you to, particularly the Ginny bit, because I was a bit proud of that piece, Harry's disgust, and his sort of callous way of dismissing her as some bizarre compilation of her various family members and WOW do I sound arrogant. Praising me goes right to my head, I swear, soon I'll be padding around in a cocktail dress and flipping my hair at my fellow suburban scum. Right, moving on: Also happy you liked the bit with Zabini, I thought it may have been a little superfluous, but I really wanted the opportunity to explore Bitch!Harry, and show people how comfortable he was in Slytherin surroundings as opposed to Gryffindor ones – I'm happy to know that it was a good addition. Really, I nitpick about these things, I'll spend days trying to decide what goes in and what stays out and I'm so grateful that your personal brand of review is reassuring me on all counts of my decisions. Hopefully I don't disappoint you in the future, because I fear this may be the last good chapter.

P.S. I may just have to start saying "Thank Jelly!" because that is too strange and too funny to pass up. Thanks again.

**Dedicated to: **This one goes to the best friend, without whom I may never have finished this chapter. Despite her vow never to actually READ the story (I quote: "It's over 30 chapters long… can't I read it later?") her assistance with the somewhat graphic bit of this chapter was absolutely integral to the process, and may my nitpicking and tooth pulling eventually be forgiven. Thanks Kitt!

* * *

Chapter 26 - Desideratum

Marjorie stood silently in the owelry and prayed. Madam Pomfrey would blow a gasket if the woman knew she was up here but Marjorie couldn't stand to be sitting for as long as she had. The nurse was overprotective, of the almost male school of "it's pregnant! It should stay where it is until everything is normal again." She had to be up and moving because sitting in the hospital wing with no one but Hermione and homework as her companion was stressful. Her grades were better than they'd ever been and she had stopped attending classes in late February. She intended to send the letter several weeks ago but things had gone so horribly wrong since then, or perhaps they'd gone right. Things were so different from how they'd been before. She had friends, a pseudo family that fit along side the real one, someone to talk to every day that she wasn't secretly ashamed of. She wasn't ashamed at all.

In November the sheer desire to talk to someone set in; her parents' disapproval, who she loved and confided in despite everything, was so overwhelming as to be nauseating. So she began writing extensive letters to her eldest sister, and that was different too; when Susan had been living with the family they hardly talked at all. Her sister complained frequently of her co-workers and the sheer loneliness that marked her variety of field work – there was no social life and the few people she knew were specialists in the field of Natural Magical Phenomena and utterly inane conversationalists. Marjorie found fewer and fewer things to complain about – her back ached, her feet were swollen and she had been craving peppermint ferociously for nearly a month, but that was discomfort, it wasn't complaint. Once she'd grown out of her initial shock and horror on Marjorie's behalf, Susan had been incredibly supportive and Marjorie had been surprised. It was a wonderful thing, she supposed, to get to know her family as an adult, a sister that had previously thought of her as nothing but a particularly small humanoid irritant was now regarding her as Marjorie the cognizant human and happily enough family.

When she was a little girl Marjorie had been extraordinarily jealous of her older sisters, Susan was the eldest, then Helen, and she was born last, as an afterthought long after her parents thought they were done. Susan always seemed like the untouchable paradigm of a daughter, her parents were so proud, and she could remember sitting next to Helen as Susan graduated with honors from Hogwarts, scraping in a full eight newts. Their mother had cried, their father had applauded until sparks flew out of his fingertips, and at the time Marjorie didn't understand what the big deal was. She didn't understand anything about Susan – and she didn't understand why Susan didn't like her. She had been all of three years old when Susan left Hogwarts, and two years later she hopped the English channel to work in Germany, and never thought twice about the five year old girl that looked up to her. She was sure, in retrospect, that she had been irritating beyond a bearable level – Susan was both caretaker and cheap labor, but to Marjorie she was a friend, the first friend she'd ever had. Marjorie was fairly sure she cried when Susan left home, and again when Helen followed her.

Marjorie didn't mind quite so much when Helen went – Helen was vicious to her as sisters often are. She loved her sister surely, but Helen was always so envious of Susan's success and Marjorie's youth that she was horrible to them both and they fought with something approaching fanaticism, Helen and Marjorie could hardly be in the same room without fighting about something. So when Helen had jetted off to France to carve her initials into the world, Marjorie had cried because she was all alone, and too old then for imaginary friends.

By the time she was old enough to process on her own and fend for herself she had been left by both siblings and her parents had nothing to do with her. They loved her, that was indisputable, but they were distant and wouldn't go to the same effort they had with their previous two children – it wasn't malice or neglect, only… boredom. Marjorie had been lonely, so lonely she wanted people she could trust, wanted a family she could wrap herself in like a blanket and never leave. She was sorted into Hufflepuff and her father had been so disappointed in her that she'd cried every night for a week. The rest of the Hufflepuffs were just as nervy as she was, many of them muggleborn and completely lost in a world of magic, and so her self pity went unnoticed.

Marjorie fingered the envelope nervously – Hermione had begged, pleaded, and worst of all rationalized against Marjorie's arguments for not sending the letter. They'd written it together months ago, when the fear of her parents was nearly overwhelming and the attachment to her child was almost non-existent. The letter had since then been added to and was now a thick volume detailing her decision to keep the baby, her hope that the child would have supportive grandparents, the wonderful things she'd found since her pregnancy, and even, potentially, the baby's name. It was a peace treaty wrapped up in a bunch of gossip, pleading explanations, and love. Hermione had been nagging her since November to send the letter, and then had gotten Susan in on it, inviting her older sister to spend a weekend with them in Hogsmeade. It made Marjorie laugh, because Hermione was a significantly better husband than Benjamin Larson would have been – and had she said it to Hermione herself the witch probably would have agreed. It was their joke, the couple of old married biddies staying up in their rooms knitting and doing reading – Hermione's knitting really had improved.

Marjorie was enjoying her life these days, despite Hermione's constant concern and the ever looming threat of war she was happy. Those things didn't touch her, happily, she had a family in Hermione, she could talk to her sister again, and her sister talked back and understood, they were even friends bridging a gap of fourteen years that her parents had unthinkingly caused. Marjorie wasn't lonely anymore, and she seriously doubted she would ever be lonely again – the approval of her parents would be impossible at this point but she realized it no longer mattered. She'd made her own family, and somehow, against all probability she'd managed to fill the holes in her life and obtain every thing that she'd wanted.

It was worth it, and she finally whistled Pigwidgeon down to deliver the letter to her parents.

* * *

It was the last weekend in March, hundreds of students would be boarding the Hogwarts Express in the morning to join the families that loved them, and part of Harry wished they'd never come back. It would make things so much easier on him to have the student body away, to be away from prying eyes, to not have to go about the daily routine of classes and meals, to simply get on with his life. But Malfoy was going too, leaving the campus with his Slytherin compatriots, joining the Dark Lord and his father for daily meetings, a happy rendezvous of 'evil twats united', and Harry needed Malfoy back. It was wrong, he knew, but Malfoy's research skills had apparently become invaluable to him, and the simple ability to keep him grounded was something that no other mind, however great, possessed.

Um… mister potter… the interruption wasn't one. Harry sat staring into the fireplace as the embers died and the room slowly retracted its heat – it would never be cold enough. The Easter Holiday was so close and a sick sense of foreboding had swamped him; Harry was worried, and sick to death with the thought of his friends returning on the castle door in bloody pieces, of the train pulling into the station with nothing but human pulp as its contents while his imagination ran away with his left-brain. A log popped in its final effort to convert to pure energy, it was a funny thing, Harry had always been prone to long silences, sitting tensely in darkness, thinking strange and disembodied little things. Long long silences born of hours in a dark cupboard where the only light came through the slats and the sound of Aunt Petunia's angry vacuum was the only company. What had he to think about then? What was weighing on his mind so heavily in the darkness, not Voldemort, not his parents, not the people that had died on his behalf, not the people that might – then what? Evading Dudley Dursley and his gang of snot-nosed children?

It was laughable, and Harry so longed for the days when he wasn't so desperate for a distraction or longing so much for finality that he was willing to jump off the astronomy tower just to have done with the 'Voldemort thing' and the only thing keeping him going was the thought of the unfortunate bastard that would fill his shoes. What would Malfoy do if he suddenly plunged off the deep end, "I'm sorry my lord, I'm so sorry, he just… I'm not sure what happened my lord…" and Harry was sure Malfoy's end would not be half as pleasant as his drop. He would be tortured first, extensively, he would lose his mind long before he lost his life, and in the very end Voldemort would be thanking him for doing the job he never could – when Malfoy met him in hell there would be no forgiveness there.

He was feeling lost, and pensive, and very tired, though there would be no sleep tonight because already he could feel himself slipping back into a pattern of hopelessness and insomnia that he didn't want to face. The absolute disappointment that set in after the hysteria was crushing. If only he were eleven again and the ease of solution came like wind and whisked him to the top of the school building.

The dregs of the Gryffindor house slowly filtered away, leaving him alone with his thoughts as the very last student, a first year by the looks of him woke from his accidental nap with a snort and scurried up the stairs with his homework printed backwards on his face. Harry's experience with the younger years was limited. He could probably point out Dennis Creevy by sight and a good deal of the fifth years but his knowledge ended there. These small and strange little creatures running around were no more human to him than the house elves, completely unaware of their happy existences – had he ever been that small?

Harry felt very much like an animal on display, like the gorilla he'd once seen in the zoo, staring contentedly into space and plotting its escape with some blond look-alike mocking him for his captivity. But the only cage bars were in his head, the very limits of his ability that he threw himself against time and time again to no avail. Someone outside his consciousness was laughing and holding the keys. It was there hovering just outside of his reach, the metaphorical snitch on the horizon that turns out to be the glint of someone's watch, the Philosopher's Stone was out there somewhere, there was a way to kill Voldemort – and no way to find it.

Harry had seriously considered sneaking into Dumbledore's office and ransacking it, looking in every niche, riffling through every locked box and cabinet drawer until he found some clue of the stone's whereabouts; but all that would find him was a not-so-comfortable cell in Azkaban, with the screaming inmates and ghosts of recently departed dementors still roaming the halls until he went mad or was found dead. Would Voldemort come rescue him as he had the other Death Eaters, or would he find Harry's imprisonment a happy coincidence? Something to laugh at in long hours of solitude with his faithful Death Eaters. He couldn't, because of Malfoy: because of the place that murdered his godfather: because of fear.

They were such a part of each other's lives and Harry hated Malfoy for being a necessity now, a necessity as disgusting as forced politeness; though Malfoy redeemed himself by never being polite. Had Draco Malfoy abandoned his friends as well? Was this distain mutual? Were Crabbe and Goyle refusing to look at him? Blaise Zabini's protests had caused him to laugh long and hard – was Malfoy alienated too? They were wrong. Hermione was wrong. Yet in the small hours of morning when he had nothing to go by and nothing to interrupt the monotony of thought and impotent frustration he remembered midnight duels, deadly Quidditch sabotage, and the panic of discovery: Dumbledore's Army indeed.

Malfoy hadn't changed his ways of mockery, he was in every day association brash, and arrogant, and cruel as he always had been for which Harry was grateful, it reminded him at least that Malfoy was still Malfoy and worthy of contempt. Still, he couldn't help wondering if the sorting hat had got it wrong all along, if all the angst concerning his similarity to Voldemort could have been avoided if Slytherin had seemed human to him, which they did now. The human emotions of isolation and fear drove men to do strange things: fear of a father's dismissal, fear of rejection from one's peers, and the simpler human joy of being young with no respect for consequence. Had he ever been that young?

"If you could only stop by earlier next time dear…" Harry heard as the portrait of the pink lady swung open gently, accompanied by her vague snoring, to admit a breeze. Harry summoned a cup of tea and sat waiting as something settled beside him with a sigh. "You've gotten better at that." It said.

"Yes well, necessity is the mother of invention." Harry quoted as the tea was lifted from the table, and chuckled when the depression in the cushions said "Now if only you'd learn to summon the milk." Malfoy slid slowly into existence, first as a pale silhouette of a human being than solidifying into color before taking on the heavy, human texture of skin and bone and weight and weariness as the invisibility charm faded.

Malfoy always looked distinctly uncomfortable in Gryffindor common; something that Harry took a secret joy in, because unnerving Draco Malfoy was more gratifying than he'd like to admit. Something about the casual chaos of it all affronted his pure-blooded propriety and his rigid posture did not fit amongst the squashed armchairs and battered pillows like Harry fit in Slytherin. But Gryffindor was closer to the humped-back witch, and Malfoy's teacup rattled on its saucer as he stared into the murky liquid. He had met his father, receiving orders no doubt, so he came here. "I wish you'd told me you were going" Said Harry.

Harry hadn't been trying to disrupt the silence or the fragile semblance of peace, but Draco snorted richly and rolled his eyes, countering his trepidation with sarcasm. "Merlin Potter, you sound like a girl. I didn't know I was going until I was," which ruined it.

"You of all people should know I'm not a girl Malfoy." He muttered mutinously and summoned another cup of tea to cover the sudden wash of embarrassment. Draco was laughing silently with his head thrown forward in the sort of agonized expression of one who has to stay silent against hilarity's best efforts, with his hands crossed over his stomach and his knees shaking. Harry scowled to hide his squirming as Malfoy, for lack of a better word, giggled into the carpet, which made Harry squirm harder.

Harry hadn't been embarrassed at the time, he hadn't been anything, it had been impossible to think with Malfoy wrapped around him, breathing into him, the feeling of near mindlessness that drove him to moaning release – but it had been very hard to look himself in the mirror the next morning and all too easy to stare at Malfoy when he'd returned. Harry had never understood why people could forget the world around them, why they could stay locked at the lips for hours enduring ridiculous pet names and the persiflage from good friends just to drool and swap saliva all over a member of the opposite sex. It was still beyond his comprehension: and yet he was beginning to understand the absolute desire to reach over and put his lips against the freckle where Malfoy's jaw met his neck in a smooth curve. He was staring.

"Er…" There was a faint tinge of pink around Malfoy's cheeks as he slurped down the cooling tea, Harry was indignant above the fizzing embarrassment he'd brought upon himself, and finally managed, "Well it's not my fault you keep attacking me," which caused Draco to choke on his tea.

An uncomfortable silence reigned between them as Harry and Draco simultaneously fought the urge to shuffle and cough awkwardly. Harry finished off the last sip of his tea which had reached that horrible lukewarm stage that congealed the milk and stuck in your throat, causing you to gag or swallow. What had possessed him to say a thing like that? It certainly hadn't been the neighbor's dog or his grandmother's pet iguana; logically he couldn't even claim the Imperius curse or temporary insanity because he was too stubborn for the Imperius to work and reasonably lacking in sanity at any hour. Harry looked up hesitantly, Malfoy's mouth was creased in a thoughtful frown, and though his jaw had widened marginally over the years, his chin maintained the dignified point his mother had given him… Harry tore his gaze away.

"It was nothing momentous." Said Draco quietly and Harry's head snapped up full of indignation, "My father simply wanted a word with his precious heir… it would have been suspicious if I hadn't gone." Harry's irrational irritability faded into the background of conversation and guilt – of course Malfoy hadn't meant _that. _Harry was being stupid. "He's mad you know."

"I'd always assumed as much." It came out more flippantly than he'd intended. "It's probably genetic."

"Thanks ever so for that Potter. Fortunately you're not in much of a position to criticize." The response was so automatically biting that Harry couldn't stop the crow of laughter that slid between his teeth and he was gratified to see a grudging smile play on Malfoy's mouth before it disappeared. "He is though. Mad. The way he talks about You-Know-Who, especially now: it's not about the muggles and the mudbloods anymore, he's… obsessed."

"Not at all like before then." Said Harry dryly, noticing how Draco shuddered at the mental image. His personal opinion of Lucius Malfoy was rather low; there had always been a flare of disgust in his eyes when he encountered Harry and Harry had always felt burning animosity towards the man who had managed to spawn the most irritating human being alive. When he'd proceeded to pawn off Voldemort's diary to Ginny Weasley the hostility had only increased. Draco's father or not, or perhaps because he was Draco's father, he deserved no pity and Harry wasn't feeling charitable.

"Again Potter, thank you for that stellar observation." Draco's laughter was sarcastic, "Though I suppose you've done me a service. If you'd said anything else I might actually worry for your sanity." He was worried for Potter's sanity, the boy was remarkably all there in the most cynical and bitter way he'd ever been, and Draco almost preferred it when he thought Harry was just an idiot with an idealist vendetta. This new focus was unnerving and hurtful, in spite of himself Draco was actually rather fond of the silly blighter, and he didn't want to think of what he'd do when Harry walked off to die.

"Glad to hear my predictability is convenient for you, though you've no need to worry for my mental health." Draco was sneering; it was perfectly appropriate, and damned attractive by Harry's reasoning. It was hard to say when Harry began thinking of Malfoy as something to be attracted to, but he couldn't help the swell of appreciation in the pit of his stomach when the sneer settled into a genuine grin and Malfoy brushed the hair from his eyes. "I can assure you, it's quite gone."

"No surprise there Potter, predictable remember? So glad to see you've moved beyond denial though."

"Malfoy?" Said Harry, probably sharper than he'd intended because the perpetual flush of embarrassment in Draco's presence had receded do a dull and emboldening hum in the back of his mind.

"Yes?"

"You're so much better when you're not talking." Harry closed the gap between them, brushing Dracos lips against his own and feeling out the subtle change in temperature that marked another person's body. This was different from before as Harry drew Malfoy closer, sliding a hand around his waist, Malfoy's mouth opened softly against his but he made no move to take command. Instead he moved his hand to rest it comfortably against Harry's shoulder and Harry's tongue slipped between his teeth, caressing his own, moving to explore the roof of his mouth.

Yes, different. Harry's blood felt on fire as he finally licked the creamy-smooth spot where that singular freckle was housed, and his hands were eagerly searching for the gap that led to Draco's amazingly delicate skin. Draco allowed this, placing gentle kisses in the spots he could reach, Harry's neck, his shoulders, his cheeks, his lips, his scar, and they moved ever so slightly backwards until Harry's weight was pinning him to the couch and Draco's fingertips slid beneath his thin t-shirt to the warm skin beneath.

It was this serene and perfect silence that was destroyed so abruptly by Draco Malfoy as he pushed Harry away from him with a look of horror, and without a word stumbled blindly from Gryffindor common.

* * *

Melena and Richard Davies were now used to the interior of St. Mungo's psychiatric ward. The Wizarding hospital didn't regard their incurables as psychiatric patients, but the Davies had done everything since the death of their first son to help their second overcome the trauma, and delving into muggle medicine was part of that everything. Eventually, however, Matthew's primary physician asked them to let be their son's mental health and simply enjoy his company as often as they could. It wasn't often anymore – they used come every day and stay for hours talking to their youngest son about everything, the local Quidditch scores, what was happening on the muggle telly, and how his classmates were doing at Hogwarts. Their visits had slowly tapered off to once a week, simply because they loved their son and couldn't stand his company.

"Mumma! Daddy!" Mrs. Davies leaned down to the level of her son and dragged him into her arms, comforting herself with his very real presence. Ever since Rodger died things had not been the same, her husband was withdrawn and irritable, the neighbors looked on them in pity, and the whole world knew just how pathetic they had become. "I've been waiting for you! I did a really cool arts and crafts project that I want you to see and Nurse Jennifer says it was one of the best she's ever seen."

A very cynical slice of the ordinarily placid Mrs. Davies insisted that Matthew's genius was because he did not attempt to eat the paste. She tried to quash the thought immediately, it wasn't right of her to begrudge her son his time in the hospital, the muggle therapist she'd spoken to called it post traumatic stress and that only patience and constant reaffirmation of their love and Rodger's death would help him overcome it, but she had never been a patient woman and this inability to do anything to help her son hurt. She'd lost both her boys over the holiday, and though Matthew was still there and available at any time the inability to share her grief with her family was crushing her. There was the horrible sensation of waiting for the other shoe to drop. "That's brilliant sweet heart, what else has Nurse Jennifer had to say?"

"She says I'm one of the best patients she's ever had cause… cause, I try to help her and…" Melena enjoyed her son's enthusiasm, he had always been such a happy child, in so many ways he still was. Her son was still the same Matthew that had grown into a snarky pre-teen and simultaneously charmed and frightened the life out of her, it wasn't that he had changed, merely gone back to what he'd been before Rodger's suicide. What he was before either of the Davies children started attending Hogwarts really, the specialists estimated Matthew's mental age to be around five, and he was just as she remembered him as a five year old. Sweet, talkative, he had a wild imagination that in no way resembled an adult's. Some parents wanted their innocent toddlers back because they were more fun, less moody, easier to take care of in the long run, but she would give anything to have Matthew back, the real thing. She just wanted her boy. "Does… does Rodger like Hogwarts? Cause cause, I wanna see him except he's not allowed to make me a toad again…"

The memories were there, and they killed her. When Rodger was a fourth year just home from his summer vacation and Matthew had been nine he'd stolen his father's wand and cast a transfiguration spell on his brother. Matthew had giggled about it for weeks. The memories were there, locked up inside his head and providing him with entertainment when he didn't know he was reaching for them, but he wasn't looking for them, didn't even realize that the memories wouldn't happen for years. And every time she had to say it again, because Richard couldn't get the words out, she had to relive the grief and the shock and the sudden return to childishness – every single time. "No sweetie… Rodger died, you know that, he's gone honey."

"What…?"

She wondered what she had done to deserve it. Wondered how horrible she had been as a mother to have both her sons lose their minds and it hurt every time she said it. It had to have been something she did – there was no other explanation for it and she hated herself for all the reasons that might have been. She hated Cho Chang with a passion, and it wasn't her fault – wasn't her fault at all that Rodger was broken hearted and that she had been murdered horribly, but Melena Davies would have happily killed the girl again if it brought her boys back. Was that so wrong? She wanted to know what she'd done to deserve that, she wanted to know why Matthew wouldn't come back to them, and she understood. Because she would give anything to have both her boys back, happy and healthy, before the school corrupted them and sent them to suicide and insanity. Was it so wrong? She just wanted her children back.

* * *

Hehe. Poor Melena, hell, I feel for the Davies, I really do – I just wish I hadn't made Roger into such a pansy-ass. But alas, needs what must, and it was all part of setting the scene.

If you read the actual NC-17 bit, Draco's abrupt departure makes more sense (or is less abrupt at least), but is not explained until the next chapter, the only bits your missing out on is the porn.

Also – There's a picture that always swims through my head when I use the word "Desideratum" which isn't often I'll admit, but it's a unique picture, and courtesy of Fiendling - the link is on this chapter at the Malf0yM0nkeys live journal.

Thanks for reading!


	27. Home

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Harry Potter (novels, industry, products, movies, person, etc.) that honor belongs to Scholastic Books and JKRowling – clearly if I owned Harry Potter (again, novels, industry, products, movies, people, etc.) there would be a lot more porn.

**Author's Notes: **Ugh god – no comment, this is where the plot starts and the whole thing with Dobby… I feel that this is where things start to get repetitive so… you may hate it. For that I apologize. I tried, I mean, really… I'm just not that great with plot devices, I'm wonderful with character pieces, I'm pretty confident in my ability to get into somebody's brain, but… plot? Oh lordy no. Speaking of brains, I do love Peter Petigrew in this chapter… he's just so damned Twitchy, it's like a thirteen year old girl with a crush "Do I tell him? Oh, no, I can't possibly tell him, what if he laughs at me? Oh but what if he finds out anyway… then he'll be confused and EVERYBODY will laugh at me, or what if I don't tell him and he NEVER finds out and we never have two children and a white picket fence, what do I do…?" for which I may love him eternally – I promise, Peter's confusion actually has some (a little, un poco) merit by the end of the story. Only a few more chapters left to go (this is 27 of 35)… and there are some flashbacks to events that happened in the previous chapter (I think, it's been a while since I've read it) in this one, which will make more sense if you actually read the porn. In light of that - you can find the entire, re-edited, uncut archive (this will include some more NC-17 scenes in later chapters) at Malf0yM0nkeys. Come visit, and to everyone that gives me feedback I wish sunshine, happiness, and a reprieve from spring-time allergies.

**Special Thanks To: **

**IHeartPineapple: **Haha, Harry was pushy wasn't he? You should read the full version of that chapter, he's pretty significantly dominant there, I was really excited to write it. And I am so glad you like Marjorie and Matthew – I wanted them to be peripheral, sort of tinting the story, I want Harry's melodrama countered by people with actual problems instead of imagined ones and so I'm really happy that you like those characters. I have no idea how a pregnant teenager would act or feel, but I'm relieved to hear that I was close to the mark – I used to work at Babies R Us and I realized that pregnant people aren't nearly as scary as the media portrays them, and I didn't want Margie to be scary – I wanted her to be a person you could sympathize with, or even like (and mostly I wanted her around to get Hermione out of the way – the dark and secret truth is finally revealed!) so I'm happy you do. Thank you once more for reading, and I hope I hear from you again.

**Mlb51: **The originality of your handle astounds me – okay, I'm sorry, just teasing. I just wanted to say thank you for reading, and for your patience (because this story requires an infinite amount) – I'm happy to know it's 'refreshing' because… well, who wants to be 'the same boring formula' right? Anyway – thank you very much for leaving a review, and we'll see you again soon (I hope)!

**PaddycakePadfoot: **I never know how to start these missives except to say "Bwahaha! Draco with an STD – that hadn't occurred to me!" Fortunately, and I'll drop a major hint here, his freakout wasn't due to a venereal disease. I tend not to consider most of the thigns that would make a person bolt like that, though I guess since they were in a common room McGonagall could've walked in at any moment, and can you imagine how embarrassing that would be? Yikes! Draco's little freak out is probably best explained in the words of Sarah McLachlan (who was embarrassingly helpful while writing this story, I now know every word to three of her albums because they were on constant repeat while I wrote): "So afraid to love you, more afraid to lose, clinging to a past that doesn't let me choose. But once there was a darkness, a deep and endless night, you gave me everything you had oh you gave me light.", and that I think is as sappy as I ever get. Happy – as always, that you like Marge. I'm absurdly proud of her, considering she's sort of my cardboard cut-out character, because she's not a Mary Sue (thank goodness!) and she does have issues, and every once in a while she irritates the ever loving hell out of me, so yeah – I'm happy you like her, and you find her realistic. While I've never been a pregnant teenager (and I never will be…mostly since I'm not a teenager anymore) I do have a sister and golly if I don't know about strange relationships – friends one minute, bitter enemies the next, the subjects you _just don't talk about _and if you don't stop me I might just go on to fill a page about how great I am. Heh. That was sarcasm, please, oh please, stop me – my ego is big enough. Anyway, back to the point and back to the chapter – thanks again for reviewing, every time I read something you've sent me I do the happy dance and scare my neighbors with cackles of glee – and that's fantastic. Thank you.

* * *

Chapter 27 - Home

"Mister Potter, a moment of your time." Breakfast in the Great Hall and Harry wasn't eating, though the Headmaster's tone suggested he should have been. Harry looked up from his book of runes and practical arithmancy with a blank expression; Hermione, had she been there at all, would have been proud. "If you would join me in my office after breakfast."

There wasn't much of a choice at that, it certainly hadn't been a request and Harry sighed heavily wondering what misfortune had put him in the Dumbledore's ill favor this time. When he did make his way out of the Great Hall and up to the fourth floor where the Head's office sat at the heart of the school, it was with great reluctance and the absolute sinking knowledge that he wouldn't escape unscathed. They hadn't spoken again since early March and Harry found it inappropriate that the headmaster should want to speak now 'are you going to become a death eater'? and the idea still made his stomach churn.

Who else was he supposed to turn to for this? One of the murmuring sycophants praising his existence and tempering his hurt and anger with clichés about things being for the best – there was no one to talk to since Sirius died, and no one to tell about Cho, and no one to accuse him of killing Roger Davies, and no best friend or friend at all since Hermione's open protest. Harry hadn't had a lot of choice, he sat back and watched his family die, and saw the pain in Molly Weasley's expression as her worst fear came true, was he expected to ignore it all and pretend that Ron was on extended vacation, was he expected to do nothing? Maybe he'd gone about it wrong, maybe he should have run screaming to his head of house for some solution outside of this one, but experience taught him otherwise, informed him in no uncertain terms that 'adults' were stumbling blind as well, and his disgust was overwhelming. He should have said yes, yes he was going to become a death eater, because clearly Albus Dumbledore didn't see fit to include him in the Order, and didn't deign to give him the information he needed to survive: yes, because they'll tell me what I need to know.

"Butter mints." He spat at Frank, and the sick rage twisting up inside his stomach flared through his blood like it always did when Dumbledore wanted a chat. It was so hard to contain, so hard not to rage and yell as he had at the end of his fifth year, so hard not to think of the happy solution to his woes, hidden in the bottom of his trunk and wrapped in a filthy pair of Vernon's old socks. Dumbledore couldn't know that, couldn't know anything, and if his mind met Harry's anger he would know it all. Legilimens, see the moments in the dark when he and Malfoy had agreed to this, quid pro quo, see the countless hours in the library as they sharpened their tongues against one another and the plan unrefined and raw as it was, see Malfoy through Harry's eyes; if he stayed angry, Dumbledore would see everything and it sobered Harry up like lightning.

There was no possible introduction he could use, no stumbled uncertain question of 'er… you wanted to see me?' or the classic 'Uhm… It's me, Harry Potter?' he even considered the remarkable genius of 'what do you want?' before deciding that he spent entirely too much time with Draco Malfoy and the impulse was quashed. Dumbledore was behind his desk when Harry opened the door and the countless portraits of former heads looked down on him with distaste. "If this is about my charms grade, Flitwick already lectured me." Which in retrospect was not much better than 'what do you want?'

"I'm sure _Professor _Flitwick was well within his rights to do so." Harry rolled his eyes, they were going to argue titles now? "But no. This concerns a more pressing development." Harry crossed his arms over his chest and refused to take the offered seat with a rediscovered petulance he hadn't seen since fourth year, Fleur Delacour had called him a child and she had been right. Stay calm, stay calm, he felt his mind hardening to ice, slick and unrelentingly cold with no crack nor crevice a human soul could find. The headmaster was speaking again. "I realize I should have discussed this with you earlier Harry, I'm afraid my habit of making mistakes where you are concerned has not improved." Harry snorted his assent, the venerable old man pressed on. "I wanted to talk to you about your living arrangements when the term is through."

It had occurred to him before, Harry had read the article with the dull sort of comprehension that said 'there goes the rest of my family' and here across a world the consequences had seemed minimal. Not for the first time since he'd received the news in the Daily Prophet, he smiled. No more Dursleys, no more Privet Drive, no more smallest bedroom or bars on the window; the dream he'd carried with him since he was small was suddenly fulfilled and it didn't mean anything. Harry thoughtfully refrained from mentioning that when term was through he very much doubted he would be living, regardless of where. He hadn't expected the Burrow to be unavailable to him, and never thought the family that haunted his daily life would ever actually be gone or that there would truly be no place for him. There was Dudley, he supposed, and probably his awful Aunt Marge; and Mrs. Weasley in her infinite generosity would probably not mind taking him in until he came of age, but since this thing had started with Ron, and maybe since Sirius had died, Harry had seriously believed he would not be coming back from Hogwarts and therefore had not made arrangements or contingencies for that event. "Hadn't given it much thought."

Dumbledore sighed and rested his fingertips against their tired counterparts, Harry simply stared on, glaring with silent efficiency until the headmaster spoke once again. "I am afraid I cannot invite you to stay here at Hogwarts. Your actions this year have been… rather questionable, and I cannot put my students at risk, I'm sure you understand." Harry translated this to mean 'because you haven't gotten the snot beat out of you for running your mouth off around Crabbe and Goyle, and because you haven't done much in the way of getting yourself killed yet, we think you're a death eater, thanks so much for attending, have a smashing afternoon.'

Harry had done nothing to disabuse the man of the notion. Perhaps it was petty, he would readily admit to being a vindictive sot when it came to Albus Dumbledore; his anger was not a thing he could readily forgive. How dare the man for assuming anything about him at this juncture? How dare he for conspiring to treat Harry like some pathetic human variant of an Othelo piece, flipping from light to dark and transferring his loyalties with a gesture. So Harry was vindictive and cruel, his thoughts were ones of revenge, and he abstained from giving the headmaster the peace of mind the man sought, and simultaneously abstained from giving him a bowman's salute – but at a greater effort.

"Remus Lupin has graciously offered to accept you into his home until next term, I do hope you'll accept." Harry wanted to be snide, it was on the tip of his tongue to say "so he's allowed a home now?" somewhere ministry guarded no doubt, somewhere they would both be watched obsessively and he could only be grateful that wizards had not yet discovered the internet. In his mind's eye emerged countless celebrity website, blogs, and obsessive fangirls ogling a series of carefully cultivated photos courtesy of Collin Creevy – Harry Potter and the Deviant Freak of Nature under one roof.

Harry wondered what choice he had, it was always an option to stay at the Leaky Cauldron through the break, but the Galleons he spent there would be better served as expenditure on a walk-up somewhere in the suburban future. Harry wondered if living with Lupin might not be enjoyable, spending his summer doing nothing but enjoying the company of a friend, learning new and heart-breaking things about his parents without the obligatory twinge of guilt and grief. Would it be cruel to Lupin to be living as a stamp and constant reminder of the things he'd lost, friends, family, parents, companionship, James, Sirius, pack, home. Would it be worth the awkward pauses in conversation and that strange stillness of propriety when an ex-professor for the sheer and numbing relief of a future and life completely without Voldemort?

Damn Albus to the pits of hell for making him hope and look forward to something, however strange or mundane, that he never had expected to hope for. For making him think, his own home somewhere populated and normal, or boarding with a friend and pseudo family until he could graduate. It was first, and third year all over, a school of Magic! "When I'm free, would you like to come live with me?" "Are you insane!?" Now what he had been looking forward to paled in comparison to the fragile picture he'd formed in his mind, and death for a moment felt like a shame and a waste. That hope of having a home again, and it all hinged on the contingency of 'if I survive.' Damn Albus.

He would talk to Malfoy about this, if only to throw things into perspective for himself – Malfoy who had come from a happy childhood and loving parents that was now responsible only for his current misery and discord because they'd left him. Maybe it was best because Lupin would only be hurt by his presence there "you look so much like your father" and he would be happier for having no responsibility of entertaining a teenager until he wandered off to die or 'give himself to the dark side.' Without a responsibility to Dumbledore or humanity then everyone could get on with life. It was a strange and delicate thought, more carefully constructed than that initial flash of hope, but he took solace in it because it was all he had to steel himself against Dumbledore's mind and the only fuel he could reasonably give his Occlumency. "I suppose that would be fine headmaster."

Harry was making to leave, wrenching on the bag that had slid from his shoulder, giving Fawkes the cursory glance, not giving Dumbledore an inch towards his ambitions, "Harry," his hand was on the doorknob, "if you ever need to talk, you know my door is always open." Harry's mouth slid into a wry sort of smile and he walked out.

* * *

Peter scampered out on three paws, painfully cutting across the grass and skirting the lake to the Whomping Willow only 20 feet away. From the Shrieking Shack he could apparate away; follow his master's signal to the un-scryable plot of land somewhere south of Hogwarts. His master never liked to be far from his followers, and they were scattered across the remains of Wizard-Britain, holed up near muggles, stewing in their own distaste. Peter Petigrew felt the first stirrings of the old familiar panic in his chest. He was going home.

He had avoided it, escaped the fear for twelve whole years, and now it was back again with vengeance. The remains of his left arm was throbbing, held tightly by the gruesome stigma of the dark-mark, and he clumsily skittered between the thrashing branches of the willow tree to press the paralyzing knot. Peter would be hard pressed to describe what kept him in Voldemort's employ, and harder still to explain his current predicament but the truth was simple fear. He owed debts that couldn't be paid without bloodshed, but the threat of pain kept him from choosing sides. All of the anger and resentment he carried with him for the last decade was twisted up in that fear, bringing hatred and imposing on him a terrible sense of obligation.

He had taken a vow when he'd betrayed the Potters, he was sworn to tell his master everything, if Potter spat, Voldemort would want to know where. It was a Potter that kept him from fulfilling his oath. He didn't want to tell his master, he had no choice but to tell his master. Harry was plotting to kill him, James' spawn was clearly in the wrong and Peter had to inform the Dark Lord. If he told him, he'd kill Harry.

So Wormtail warred with himself. 'If I don't tell him, he'll know. He always knows, I can't lie to him – he's too powerful.' And the mantra repeated in his head. Maybe Dumbledore allowed his spies that autonomy, the freedom to get away with withholding information, maybe Dumbledore would allow the blatant disrespect, but Peter did not work for Dumbledore. Only a Death Eater could understand, and how could he then expect Harry to acknowledge his dilemma?

Every day was constant panic, whenever the Dark Lord called, he knew that it could be the one, that moment where he didn't come back, where he lost his mind, where he died. Forever.

Peter didn't want to die. He didn't want to tell his master about Harry's plotting, he owed a debt, he felt for the scrawny kid that in another reality might have been his godson, but he had to. When he did, and he would, Harry would die, Voldemort would kill him – but if he didn't then the Dark Lord would kill them both, equality by murder. It was easier this way, more for the benefit of man kind, to save one at least, because when Peter mentioned Harry's murder plot he'd certainly be… punished for not taking care of the problem. And if he took care of the problem he would certainly be… punished for taking the initiative. But this way was best, it had to be best, because pain was better than death, and Harry would just have to understand that wizard's vow or no the survival instinct is a powerful thing. It wasn't his fault.

It wasn't as though Peter wanted Harry to die, it wasn't at all like he was asking the boy to kill himself. It was Potter's fault in the first place; his doing entirely. Peter couldn't be blamed for following orders. Potter was owed a favor, Peter didn't want to share his knowledge with Voldemort, he didn't want to, but he surely felt that in his shoes Potter would do the same. If only he'd forget stupid vendettas, he'd gotten himself into this mess, if he wanted to survive it there was only one way – couldn't he just join the death eaters? Then Peter wouldn't have to choose, he wouldn't have to pay his debt to Potter in such a way, Potter wouldn't have to die because of him – there wouldn't be any more guilt to top the fear, and anger, and resentment, and pain. It was only his parents after all, Harry would still be alive.

And maybe that's what he'd do. Maybe he'd take the logical choice and beg the Master for forgiveness, choose to live so Wormtail wouldn't have to make the choice for him. And maybe for the moment Peter could be silent, waiting to see what he'd do because it was all up to Potter. Wormtail trusted Harry not to betray him, not even the son of James Potter could be that bloody minded.

It was desperate, Peter's most fervent desire – he wouldn't have to say a word until it was unavoidable. There was a scream of terror welling up inside him, and no sound nor motion to give it away. He could feel it ripping from his lungs and pulling his soul from the depths of his nervous abdomen, catching in his throat as he opened his mouth to speak. "Apparate."

* * *

When snakes are frightened they retreat to safe, quiet places. Places they can watch and not be seen, places they feel their most comfortable. The problem with Malfoy Manor as a whole was this: There was no safe place for Draco Malfoy to retreat to. There was no where for him to go that Potter was not, no singular place that hadn't held a thought of Harry, and every place he stumbled to after that horrible moment of realization in the Gryffindor common contained a piece of Potter that was so vibrant he found himself curled around a pillow in the center of his bed, completely lacking the peace of mind he desperately craved. He was home, and alone, with no one to talk to and no one to distract him, no book seemed entertaining enough, and the change in location had simply served to remind him that everything had in fact changed and that home simply wasn't home any longer.

He could have stayed there forever, watching the world through the hazy glow of breathlessness, rubbing those gentle circles over Harry's prominent shoulder blades. He could have been content lying there with Harry's face in his shoulder, and his weight holding him to the threadbare couch until the world ended. He could have stayed within the warmth and the familiar glow of…Draco had to leave. He had to get out of that contenting environment, it hadn't mattered that Harry had landed on his butt with a squawk, it hadn't mattered that his shirt was hanging in shreds around his shoulders and that his trouser button had popped off, he'd simply needed a place to run.

Lying there, completely vulnerable, trapped by someone equally trusting, it had unnerved him, given him over to the quick flush of introspection and Draco had panicked. What would his mother say? This was Potter, Potter who he was so comfortably snug against, Potter who'd all but yelled his name, Potter who was committing himself to an early grave alongside his favorite enemy, and what he meant by that he wasn't sure.

Voldemort wanted him dead; that much was clear. Despite wheedling and oh-so-carefully made statements as Draco tried to save his life, it was perfectly obvious that the Dark Lord was intent on killing Harry Potter as soon as humanly possible. He would meet him, humor him, amuse himself with Harry's seeming betrayal of his only friends, and laughingly murder his little 'ally' while Potter would be expecting acceptance and reward for his conversion. He knew that Harry wasn't expecting anything from Voldemort. Harry knew to keep his guard up, knew the Dark Lord hated him, knew in this political fiasco that they'd be exchanging forced pleasantries mere moments before they leapt for the throat. Draco wanted desperately to avoid the whole situation.

It wasn't right to do those things, act on lust and emotion like an unthinking animal. He was a Malfoy for Merlin's sake; he had to stay in control. He couldn't afford to get attached. He couldn't handle it if, after all of their hard work, after the exhaustion and the victories, they'd failed, if he died. Draco Malfoy didn't think his mind could accept those terms: it was selfish yes, but after laughing and those happily sardonic comments, after rivalries and arguments, if he became attached now his mind would fragment when Harry died. It would be the final straw in a cascade of hay; Draco would be buried if he lived because Harry would die.

And as for Harry, Draco didn't remember when his heart started to beat faster around him, or when he started to smile unconsciously whenever Potter walked into a room, or when his mind stammered at the thought of that devious grin, or when he'd started thinking of him in the long term and not as just a nuisance, but as a best friend. Everything Harry got close to died. Draco didn't want to die, and he didn't want Harry to see him die and know that once again it was his fault – selfish. Everything Draco got close to turned to shit, Harry couldn't afford to be tarnished any further and Draco didn't want to watch it happen.

So better never to let it start at all, and never let Harry be close, and never express anything but a remote interest in their cause. Better to never admit to it, because it would just be so much harder to let go, so best never to start.

It had been hard, impossible, to lay there and know what Voldemort intended. While Harry breathed into him in the dazed, half-wakingness of absolute contentment, Draco saw him a splayed corpse at the Dark Lord's feet. The betrayal in his expression when he realized Draco had indeed delivered him to his death. Because Voldemort would kill him. Whether it was that very evening or years later when Harry Potter was no longer an entertainment, he would die, and Draco had facilitated the whole idea of confrontation. He hoped and prayed against all possibility that Harry's scheme would work – but he knew it wouldn't. So the kinder thing would be to pray for death that night, quick, easy, painless in a flash of green oblivion.

And when Harry turned around dying, he would see a childhood enemy, a new confidant who he never should have trusted. Not the pained, affectionate, heartbroken and treasonous lover in Draco Malfoy. Which was the kindest thing of all.

* * *

Harry Potter groaned and stepped out of his shower, engaging mindlessly in various post-shower activities as the scene replayed over and over in his head. Always when he was alone, and every time he tried to think of anything at all it flickered behind his eyes and ran down the line of his spine straight to his groin until he couldn't think at all. Had Draco Malfoy really felt like that beneath his fingertips? What could he do? Had his skin always been that soft and pale? He shaved carefully, scraping the razor across the stubble that grew in patches around his chin and cheeks. And Harry couldn't help the swell of memory, lust, confusion, and anxiety that churned in his gut – the absolute horror on Malfoy's face.

They'd avoided each other at breakfast. Or Harry had avoided Malfoy, or Malfoy was avoiding him. Harry had never felt quite so out of his depth. Just as he was beginning to think Draco was impossible to insult he did something strange that drove Harry up a wall. Harry had barely restrained from following Malfoy out of Gryffindor, and even now, days after the fact, he was sitting on the urge to pout. They hadn't gotten anything accomplished, Malfoy had dashed away to Hogsmeade and buried himself away in a train compartment when Harry had tried to approach him, and it was now a complete 72 hours since they'd put their heads together over a book or kicked a chair in frustration.

Harry did up the zip of his jeans, slid into a T-shirt, and left the student bathrooms in a mental fog of Draco Malfoy, bothering with shoes or his invisibility cloak. The castle was perfectly empty, the hollow thud of his footsteps as they echoed down the halls only served to emphasize that emptiness until Harry knew he was all alone in the world. Food would fix this. Different though he was in the ways of the world and the eyes of tragedy, strange and foreign as Harry Potter was to normal, somewhere just beneath the surface of jaded certainty was a boy like any other – food would fix anything. He padded down to the kitchens, cool flagstones a strange comfort to his bare feet, with the vague hope that he could procure the Cookie of Reality and sink his teeth into a slice of Sanity. He and Malfoy would go back to being he and Malfoy, none of the rules would have changed, and the charge of animosity would not have become so reversed that he would look towards Ginny Weasley and the alternate population of Hogwarts with disgust. Food had a lot to fix.

Malfoy was electric. Magnetically tuned to Harry's exact wave-length, and when their skin met Harry could almost believe there were sparks. But he'd panicked, and run out of the room with a look on his face that Harry could only describe as 'terrified' having seen it so many times before, so maybe Malfoy wasn't electric and Harry was losing his mind. Either way, he refused to think about it because thinking about it made it harder not to chase him, and harder still not to reach over again and trying to decide once again if Malfoy's skin was hot or cold to the touch. Harry decided he was going to need a rather massive Oblivion Cracker and possibly Comfort Soup to get through this.

The pear under his fingers was fuzzy, and years after he'd been introduced to the kitchens Harry still wondered how you tickled a fruit, but he gave it a little rub anyway and the pear giggled and turned into a cool knob beneath his palm. "Harry Potter has come to see Dobby!" He was still an enthusiastic green gnome with a variety of headwear stopped only by his ears, but he was the first person to be happy to see Harry in weeks, and for all the times Dobby had helped him expecting nothing in return but miss-matched socks at Christmas, he deserved at least a smile. "Dobby is happy to see Harry Potter, Dobby wonders what Harry Potter needs!"

Harry Potter found it amusing that Dobby asked his question in the way of personal statements, as though he'd taken a Muggle course in relationships and had gotten everything slightly wrong. Never make a 'you' statement, begin with 'I' statements, 'I feel as though…' He also had a very difficult time of not reaching out to steady the top hat that was swaying precariously atop the pile of knitted caps and bonnets as Dobby nodded with every third word. "I was just…" he wasn't hungry, he certainly didn't want to be sent on his way with half a dozen éclairs and no clarity whatsoever, "In the mood for… cocoa."

That was the thing about actually being in the kitchens. They were warm, and bright, and there were counters and tables and always something simmering in a pan for the next morning. They did not invite tea or coffee, it was strange to stand leaning heavily against one of those spotless counters and drink anything but cocoa, because the whole feel of the place screamed 'Christmas Movies' and 'Be happy you're inside on a day like this.' These kitchens were designed with hot chocolate in mind, and though he had no taste for sweets and a desperate hatred of chocolate these days, he couldn't simply ask for anything else.

There wasn't much of a lapse, Dobby hopped to it quite literally, losing three hats and scrambling to pick them up again while someone in the background clucked disapprovingly at his 'aberrant' behavior. Soon Harry was wrapped around his requested chocolate, sitting on a countertop and trying not to fidget uncomfortably under the adoring gaze of his (and Dobby was very strangely his) house elf. Hermione would have murdered him for the thought, "house elves are living creatures, not slaves!" and it was perfectly appropriate for her to have a cat that probably didn't deserve to be a living creature and tried to eat the house elves. At least Crookshanks didn't seem to care when it was Harry scratching him behind the ears and not his 'dear mummy' who was increasingly taken with the introduction of a new infant – a cat was a cat and didn't give a damn about who did it as long as he was properly worshiped.

In her honor though, he asked because it was strange to think of Hermione in this detached and cynical way of the non-friend, "So… how's Winky?"

"Not good Harry Potter sir, not good." Dobby pulled his ears flat against his face, looking for all the world like an old woman in a bonnet before they sprung away from his grasp to keep his errant headwear in line. He put a long thin finger to his lips and hung his head, "Harry Potter is good for asking sir, but Harry Potter should be knowing that Winky… Winky is having two bottles a day now sir." Another thing for Harry to feel guilt over, Barty Crouch and his ridiculously easy ploy, the horrible moment where Winky lost her job over Harry's wand and the look of pity Hermione held every time she tried to cheer the besotted house elf up. "I is thinking Winky would be happier if someone takes her clothes."

Harry conceded the point, it was probably true – she would probably be much happier caring for a wizarding family, cleaning, and cooking, and taking orders, and having no autonomy because she didn't want to have to think. She would have been happier trimming the grass around Bartemius Crouch's ministry-owned grave and so much happier than she could have been deciding for herself what her life should be about. "You should probably talk to Headmaster Dumbledore about it."

"Dobby has tried sir! Headmaster Dumbledore is a good man, he would not hear of taking her clothes sir. Dobby and Winky is not important enough to be bothering him again." One little house elf working on the behalf of a second to place her in a wizarding home despite her guilt of having betrayed her family over something she had no power to stop – no, he didn't imagine Dumbledore would have time for that. There was a time when the Headmaster might have regarded Dobby's plight as worthy of notice, but he'd redoubled his efforts since Hagrid had died, and was working furiously to find the Dark Lord, delegating his duties as School Administrator to his second in command, and everyone working below him was just as tired. The word filtering down through rumor and Auror associations was that Dumbledore was waiting on Kingsley Shacklebolt to report back on his exact location before the first strike was made, but Auror Shacklebolt had run squarely into bad luck and had been hospitalized by repeated use of a childish dancing spell that had worn down the soles of his feet to mangled stumps.

Harry grunted by way of response. If he hadn't been developing his Occlumency so fervently, the Headmaster might have known that Voldemort had offered, Malfoy now met with him once a week and he could probably find in his sleep the illegal port-key to the sprawling manor where the Dark Lord was hidden. But Harry had been studying, and the Headmaster did not know that there was a meeting with Voldemort somewhere in his direct future and he'd had to wait on Auror Shacklebolt to tell him that 'I'm sorry, but I couldn't find anything.' Harry was absurdly happy about this and considered it a fitting revenge for suspecting him of Death Eater aspirations. "Dobby wonders if Harry Potter could help him." Harry had forgotten the elf was there.

"Uh. Sure Dobby, I'll see what I can do." Maybe in a fantasy life where he could get his own place after graduation and work at a normal job and survive to see the end of his N.E.W.Ts. Maybe he could take a house elf then, and Dobby would be welcome to come if he promised never to bang his head against the walls, or slam it in the oven door, or iron his hands to flatness. Or maybe Malfoy would accept a house elf as a graduation gift from Professor Dumbledore, a cheap way to keep his the mansion clean and his laundry folded.

But for that he needed to survive, and for that he needed at least a snowball's chance in hell instead of the absolute zero statistic he'd achieved since giving up on the stone. Harry went to bed every night praying to some vague deity for a not-so-vague miracle. Where was the convenient plot twist, the fabled Mirror of Erised to guide him to it, or someone whispering secrets in his ear from the castle walls. Where was Hermione to curse suddenly and dash to the library when she was absolutely sure she'd found the answer to the world's problems. It was back to the same old thing, around in the same circles he'd trodden before, and the same reverent prayer of "I wish someone would just tell me where the stupid Philosopher's Stone is so I can get on with my life."

"Dobby cannot say sir, Dobby swore to the Headmaster he would not say."

Harry hadn't realized he'd spoken aloud until then, but it didn't make much of a difference if Dobby knew he was after the stone because for some strange reason Harry trusted the little elf to keep his secrets behind that wide and knowing smile. It couldn't possibly be this easy – his ears were betraying him or at any moment someone would jump out from behind the pot racks and the islands and yell 'surprise!' to crush the sick relief he felt now. But Dobby was biting the tips of his fingers. Sometimes it was this easy, and the house elf gave you the Gillyweed you needed to save your Weasley, or your first friend in the entire world let something slip about a wizard. Harry kicked himself for not asking before. "Did you just say you know where the stone is?"

"Dobby cannot be saying sir, Dobby is a bad elf, bad elf, he is saying too much!" Harry got his miracle and wanted to shake the elf in frustration, wanted to shake himself in disbelief. But Dobby was doing a very good job of that himself by yanking his ears back and forth, sending hats toppling in exactly seventeen different directions. "Dobby wants to help Harry Potter sir, but Dobby cannot be saying it is in a place as straightforward as milk. Dobby cannot be saying."

Harry knew that was all he was going to get from the house elf from some hours besides wails of self-inflicted pain and mutterings about how he'd said too much. The elf was just a bit like Hagrid in that way: letting something slip that made him curious and angry and stubborn enough to do something about it. "Stop stop. Just stop, you don't have to tell me. It's not important." Even though it was, the most important thing Harry could imagine knowing, and the only thing that might save his life. He just couldn't stand to see the little creature trying to rip himself down the middle because of a slip-up, because he'd let frustration get the best of him and said something, and though he couldn't stand knowing that the stone was out there, within his grasp, he found he could almost let it go because he was too tired to care and Voldemort would kill him anyway – Harry wasn't so self-important to believe it would matter.

"Dobby wants to help Harry Potter." But he looked relieved, and his ears were a pained red from base to tip. "Harry Potter is a good wizard. Dobby does not think Harry Potter is a bad wizard, Harry Potter is Dobby's friend and Dobby knows bad wizards when he sees them sir." Harry was silent, listening to the little elf as he rambled and trying not to think in third person. He couldn't ask for direct information, he knew he couldn't. Dobby would literally brow beat himself into oblivion if Dumbledore hadn't gotten there first and disabled him from speaking the location at all. Harry had a great respect for the headmaster these days, and very little trust. "Dobby is not to be saying in these walls what that place is, but Dobby wants to help. Harry Potter should follow Dobby now."

Thin, firm fingers wrapped around Harry's hand. Harry had expected them to be cold and clammy, but they were warm, dry, and felt a bit like coarse leather; he was pulled to a cupboard merely two meters away and wondered what the elf was showing him and how Malfoy Jr. ranked on Dobby's list of 'bad wizards'. It was an unremarkable, unromantic, and uninspiring Tupperware cabinet. If Dobby was going to feed him he couldn't say he was interested because the thought of food had fled when he entered the kitchen, and only his enthusiastic friend had kept him from turning around.

But loyalty to a friendly creature that had happily saved his life and nearly killed him more times than he could count was a stronger thing than his misgivings about muggle food storage, so he stayed. Crouched beside the elf, who was digging through the jars and dishes with reckless abandon and little consideration for their often sloppy contents. That was always the way it worked – that last succulent dish was at the very back buried behind the new cheeses and Chinese food and the left over turkey from who knew when. "Chicken…" muttered Dobby, "Dobby does not like chicken." He continued to dig until there was nothing left in the cold storage but the ketchup (which is always the case in any kitchen) then he grinned triumphantly at Harry before cracking his long and massive knuckles in a way that could only be described as horrifyingly musical.

"Harry Potter should follow Dobby!" Unlike most of the trap doors and secret passage ways in Hogwarts, this did not grind aside as though the magic couldn't lift it, this door cleverly disguised in the back of a cold storage cabinet revealed itself with a quick and scientific 'shwick' that packed three times the efficiency and lacked the drama. "Dobby will help Harry Potter."

* * *

Yeah – so my plot devices suck. Thanks for reading in spite of them – see you next time. 


	28. Coming Together and Falling Apart

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Harry Potter (novels, industry, products, movies, person, etc.) that honor belongs to Scholastic Books and JKRowling – clearly if I owned Harry Potter (again, novels, industry, products, movies, people, etc.) there would be a lot more porn. … and just possibly banana fritters.

**Author's Notes: **So – I actually have no idea what goes on in this chapter, it's been so damned long since I've read it that I just have no feckin' clue. I think there's some crazy Draco with a side on Sick!Draco and nutzo!Harry (which hey, by now, no surprise) and I think, again, I was trying to start with the whole 'plot' thing which never manages to work for me. Really, the only reason I'm posting at this exact moment in time is because I needed something to do while my painting dries so I can slop a second coat on there and get to work on the main structure tomorrow and I'm sure that's more than you needed to know, but I just happened to remember that one of the lovely people that reviewed me recently was a portrait artist (I read her profile, I was bored) and I thought 'painting – picture – hey! Twasits!' which is, believe it or not, how my brain works, and may be a major insight into the nature of this story. In light of that - you can find the entire, re-edited, uncut archive (this will include some more NC-17 scenes in later chapters) at Malf0yM0nkeys. Come visit, and to everyone that gives me feedback I wish the craziest ideas/inspirations ever to have landed in your brain. It's a fire, go with it.

**Special Thanks To: **

**IHeartPineapple: **YAY! So glad you liked it (enough for a marriage proposal – wow!) Yeah, I'm sort of a fan of my Dumbledore – or rather, I'm a fan of not being a fan of him. I think he… well, Harry pretty much explains it all near the end but… yeah, he's never been my favorite character, he's always given me a bit of a wiggins, and I'm so glad you're not yelling at me and bashing down my metaphorical door with a battering ram and a pitch fork to defend him. As for reading the full version – I'm sorry, I'd completely forgotten there are still minors in the world. Okay, not strictly true, but I've been reading and writing the 'slightly risqué' since I was about 15, and sometimes I forget that people actually have parents that pay attention. Good for your mom! (sorry, that was condescending, but I like parents that care). That's why I gave the option of having it posted on LJ, so yay, the system works – and I'm really glad it doesn't detract from the story to have pages chunked away from it. Anyway, thanks again, so very much, for reading and here's hoping you like Ministry Blunders!

**PaddycakePadfoot: **Just call me Lizzie Borden – well, no, not actually. It was just a statement on how much I enjoy dropping the Axe. I can absolutely tell you that Harry will die in this story. The question should be 'will he stay dead?' As for Dobby… oh man, I dunno, I was starving (if all the allusions to food weren't in evidence) and the tone of the story had changed so completely since my initial mapping that it just seemed… would it completely ruin your opinion of me if I said I was desperate, panicking, and just wanting to finish the thing so I came up with the simplest little plot device I could? Yes… probably, but hey – now you know. Also, Voldemort was going to be more campy, and more neo-Nazi, and there's a little bit of him like that here, but there are nuances that I definitely could have added and didn't. Speaking of nuance, there's lots of it in this chapter… not that any of it applies anymore, and yes, I'm laughing at myself. There's no Hermione or Marge here either (they fall in and out of popularity with me), but hopefully you'll be happy with Tonks instead, she's a bit of a late character, but I really like what she does for the end of the story, and hopefully you will too. Anyway, and much to the point of this extended little note, thank you again, and here's hoping this next installment isn't too much of a disappointment (I'm lying, I actually sort of love this chapter, but that's because it's useless). :D Thank you!

**Pntmeblu: **I've been called neurotic, but never a narcotic… cool!

* * *

Chapter 28 – Coming Together and Falling Apart

Draco wasn't going to the hall. His morning routine had been spectacularly delayed as he thought nervously of how to approach Potter for the first time since what had been grudgingly labeled 'the incident', his near panic attack, his idiocy. A whole week since he'd last seen Potter, a whole week to stew in his own nervous reactions and to suffer the Dark Lord's impatience at his progress, and to feel as though the world was crashing down around him. He woke up with that sudden horrible awareness that everything about the day was wrong and therefore the entire day would be ruined. It seemed a trivial thing to worry about good days and bad days when all the days ran together lost in a sense of what could be accomplished and what had not yet been done. Good and bad seemed irrelevant and the question that marked the hours had to be "where is it?" and "have I actually lost my mind?" So he'd gotten out of bed and brushed his teeth despite the stay-clean charm and sat with his head in his hands on the couch in the common until Vincent Crabbe snorted himself awake and joined him in the groggy dungeon light.

This had been the morning routine for six years until Draco interrupted it, he didn't have a routine anymore. There were some days he'd stay in bed until the latest possible moment, only hauling his carcass away from the mattress when his roommates had departed for the first class of the morning and he barely had time to make potions in the vague hope that he would learn something incredible there. Or he never slept at all, falling into bed and crawling out of it at first light without his eyes having closed at all, leaving his former friends to their own devices. Vincent sat down beside him, making the cushion tilt towards his own center of gravity and Draco to be thrown off kilter, orbit irreparably changed by Planet Crabbe.

"Draco." Said Crabbe and the tables slowly rotated until it was the ever articulate Draco Malfoy who was found to be grunting his acknowledgement. "Draco can I ask you something?" Another grunt, though it would not have been beyond him to point out that indeed Crabbe had asked a question. Such a waste of energy and this Neanderthal he'd called his friend was staring at him in concern until Draco lifted his eyes to meet Vincent's and blinked once in assent. "Draco, are you friends with Potter?"

Draco rolled his eyes: they were painfully bloodshot because of Potter and his infectious inability to sleep; every day they were together hidden in some forgotten corner of the library, hunting through the dusty relics of school statues and fortunate mirrors for something, anything, a glimpse, and falling together when they couldn't stand to keep their eyes open any longer. At home he had done the same, the endless books a darker society of bound knowledge that was writhing in his mind as a direct result of Potter. He was working for him like some plebian accountant, keeping his books and his sources in line, and had Harry not been trying just as hard Draco might have felt bitter about this, but his terrible human sympathy reached beyond the bounds of his usually cool and justified logic. Infinite affection and indulgence for Harry Potter.

Friends, yes that was one word for it. Passing acquaintances was certainly a bit of an understatement, and Draco's attention had definitely shifted from money and power and the fear his dorm mates held for him. Had they not he would have been shooting Crabbe a glare instead of answering back in the horrible habit of his own question. "Why do you ask?"

Subterfuge had never been the forte of the famous mind-sharing Crabbe and Goyle, they had half a brain between them and this quarter-brain was showing now as he shuffled his feet. "Well… Blaise says that he's gone over to…well, you-know-who and I was just kind of confused," big surprise, "and…. Draco…" Draco cocked an eyebrow, one of the very first lessons in Basic Malfoy Facial Expressions to unnerve the visual prey and waited impatiently for Crabbe to finish his sentence. This nervous pausing was a new habit the troll/boy must have developed in defense when Draco's attentions were no longer focused on humiliating the surrounding populous – who had they been following now? Hive-minded to the core they had to have a leader in someone, was it Zabini, had Parkinson somehow managed to worm her way in? "Are we still friends?"

"Go to breakfast Crabbe." Was his response, and Draco buried his face again, hoping not to see that gargantuan lost-puppy expression. He could use Crabbe, he always had, but the line between useful and hindrance had always been narrow and he very seriously doubted he could muster the concentration to navigate that mere thread of concept. He daren't try.

There was double Defense first thing this morning, another class in which he would have to stridently avoid Potter's gaze and he didn't think he could manage it without blushing, scowling, or simply banging his head on the desk until he caused himself serious brain injury and had to be shipped to St. Mungo's and share a ward with Gilderoy Lockheart and his Amazing Glinting Teeth. He couldn't share a meal with Potter without squashing the urge to go maul the friends that had so effectively spurned him, so much for house-pride and hanging together in times of trouble, he couldn't share a class with him without wanting to run his fingers through his perpetually tangled hair and smooth the crease between Harry's eyebrows. He couldn't see Harry Potter at all.

It was ridiculous. Absolutely the epitome of mad when it was all Draco Malfoy could do not to coddle Harry Potter into restful oblivion and it was horrible that some to-cruel house mate had transfigured his heart into a fluttery snitch and a stone in one go. There was no excuse for his behavior excepting perhaps the nerves and disgust he felt distributed in equal measures. Draco was losing his mind, coming apart at the seams and he couldn't stand watching himself do it. So now he was reduced to hiding, dodging questions from Crabbe of all people and curling away on his favorite seat until he turned to stone and became a permanent testament to Slytherin Pride in the common room. Or at least until his dorm mates threw out the couch, disgusted with the sight of him.

Draco indulged himself in this self-pity and strange misery of avoidance. His body ached, his mind ached, he was a wonder unto himself for the simple ability to move. A week, exactly a week, and every day something went wrong, every day he'd been unable to control himself, or he said something that went beyond the bounds of stupid and fell firmly into the clutches of masochism. Every day of that week he woke up wishing the Dark Lord would just kill him instead of the inevitable minutes of agony under the cruciatus curse for his incompetence. Every day Draco wanted to go home, leave the people he'd once considered family and comrades to their stupid power plays and their juvenile political idealism, just leave them to their own devices. Now, after a day away, when he had time to recover, when his bones still ached and his body still twitched for simple relief and he wanted nothing more than a nap and some of Potter's poorly summoned tea, something had decided to compound the problem.

Some time during the night his arm had begun to itch mercilessly and if he hadn't been insane before it was certainly driving him up a wall now. He should have told Harry, gone immediately to him and mentioned that Voldemort was doing something strange with the dark marks and that his was itching so terribly that even his incredible self-control had cracked and he was itching until the skin pulled up underneath his fingertips and only made the problem worse. It had been 24 hours since he'd last seen the dark lord, surely neither the dark lord nor his father wanted to see him again so soon after a week of his company, surely in their shared madness they realized that Draco was still a full student and did not have the autonomy and freedom of so many of his adult counterparts.

It had been exactly 184 hours since he'd really talked to Harry Potter, and while he was sure Harry would care, hate him for not mentioning the itching when it had begun, and while he was sure that Harry would be bothered by this recent occurrence Draco's pride and embarrassment was keeping him here very far away from Gryffindor and it's members. He could pass a note during class, but he could not face a class conducted by the tiny and star-struck Professor Blirghty where Potter would have the opportunity to shift their desks together and whisper in confidential voices apologies and recriminations, and those things that made 'friends' what they were as Crabbe had so eloquently put it.

Very much against his will Draco moved. Shuffling down the boy's-side walk to the 6th year dorms and nodding a brief hello to his confused dorm mates. If anybody asks, Draco Malfoy is not attending due to reasons of insanity, thank you and good night.

* * *

Tonks was sweating beneath her blue hair. She was an auror of the highest class, rewarded for her efforts in the Ministry when Voldemort had shown himself to be alive and well in defiance of the Minister's fondest wishes. Her hair had been pink then – she watched her cousin die then, it had been quite the experience. Since that fateful evening she'd been running raids, deeply immersed in her career to remove from mind the horrible sight of the elder Goyle's head growing and shrinking by degrees in the bell-jar, and to erase the memory of Ronald Weasley screaming as she visited his mother in the hospital who refused to leave her son's side while he recovered from the gross mental invasion.

She was still Nymphadora Tonks of course, still happy, still clumsy, still a nightmare as she thought of the half-giant and how much he had really meant to Hogwarts before Albus Dumbledore sent him to his death. There was always that, always the possibility that they would all die – Voldemort was back and he was taking no prisoners. Purebloods that worked for the order were to be eradicated for associating with muggle scum, muggleborns and halfbloods were being thrown to the dogs (quite literally) and it was time at last to move.

Tonks moved her fist, three fingers to the aurors who were waiting beside her and they broke away from the squad to flank the west end of the building. Four to the right, two along the south end and she would be leading a contingency of men to storm the main gates, seven in all – and she sought to keep them thoroughly distracted. Alastor Moody had come through at last, sacrificing five of the ministry's men to finding Voldemort, and only Shacklebolt had come back alive, missing his feet. The old, very old now that she thought on it, Auror was forbidden to attend the raid, his scarred face had contorted in a mask of rage when delivered the news by the Head of Defense, who had taken his job ten years ago. So it was up to Tonks, who had the Order behind her, who had the authority of the failing Minister, who knew the location of Voldemort, and it was up to Tonks to lead the raid.

"Wands at ready." She hissed and the call was heard around the building to her sixteen delegates, echoing in the electric crackle of ear pieces provided by the muggle government. No spells before absolutely necessary, no magic before it had to be used, nothing to alert the Death Eater fortress of their presence, if only she'd had the foresight to change her hair. But it was Ministry colors, and left her troops well aware of her presence. Tonks flung her robes out behind her as her second in command threw a flash-bomb (another acquisition from the oh-so-helpful muggle government) through a ground window. It had been altered ever so slightly, when the grenade erupted it would trigger certain magical defenses including a dissaparition charm like the one blanketing Hogwarts, there would be no escaping tonight for either side and Tonks could only hope that they'd make it out alive against the well-trained Death Eaters.

"GO GO GO!" and the hedges lit up as her men rushed in, brave souls that burst through the windows and charmed away the doors flinging hexes and curses at their assumed targets in flashes of multicolored light, and Tonks at their head screaming "_REDUCTO_" at the doors which exploded and shrapnel flew in every direction and chaos reigned in the relatively modest three story chateau.

There were Death Eaters there, some unconscious on the ground floor, stunned by the blast of light and magic that blinded them, more pouring down the stairs in a wave of curious motion, and even a few caught completely unawares with their feet tucked into undignified slippers and bath robes. But the minions of Voldemort were too-easily subdued for her peace of mind, too easily rendered unconscious and too easily stunned into submission. They had lost one, a very young man by the name of Michael Pelgrave that Tonks had helped train herself, felled by a blast of pure pressure to his windpipe that some clever minion of evil had perpetrated.

It was sad, and horrible, and Tonks had watched as he tried to gasp and cough, which had only resulted in a faint trickle of blood that dripped from the side of his mouth. One against over 40 death eaters, one, and even after they searched the chateau there was no sign of the Dark Lord, and there was no sign of a pending battle, and no sign that this country estate had housed anything more dangerous than a humble meeting of minds. No dark artifacts, no obvious malicious intent. With rage in her veins the too-young commander yanked up the left sleeve of an unconscious "death eater" and saw nothing there but the blue veins beneath the skin of a perfectly normal elbow. "FUCK!"

* * *

Harry went hunting at lunch, his meeting with the Headmaster had not gone well and the day seemed to progress in a series of neck breaking drops from there. He had sat all alone and endured the vicious stares that Hermione shot him through two hours of Defense, and wondered where Malfoy was. He then joined the Ravenclaws in Greenhouse 5 tending to the venomous tentacula for over an hour. Padma and Parvati Patil had allowed him to join their group, pruning the dead leaves from the cruel plant and had been distracted enough to let the damned thing take a swipe at him. "Mister Potter! Be careful with that plant, the poor thing's teething and you've upset it! Five points from Gryffindor." Professor Sprout cared more for her plants than her students, that had always been true, but Harry didn't appreciate the glare that the Patil Twins had sent him before he had been expelled from the greenhouse twenty minutes before class was out for accidentally knocking over a simple Venus Fly Trap in embarrassment.

Harry had gone wandering, wondering if Draco had simply slept through Defense, and wondering what Malfoy would say if he were to suddenly show up outside of his Arithmancy class to demand an audience. Even the mental repercussions of that imagined conversation had been painfully caustic so he avoided that avenue and had simply gone to the Great Hall to wait, sitting in his lonely corner of Gryffindor and trying not to relive the nightmare as imaginary house mates glared at him for 'going over to the dark side' and dashing the hopes of all and sunder. All and sunder could bite his ass. It was silly and self-important, he wondered what Seamus' mum would have to say about him now as the plates and cutlery popped into existence and a few of the earlier students wandered into the Great Hall for the afternoon meal.

Harry had hoped that Draco would arrive in the great hall and that he could intercept him from there, but the Slytherin was apparently intent on avoiding him, whether deliberately or coincidentally. It was somewhat infuriating, because damnit – Draco was supposed to be there when Harry needed him, that was part of the agreement and they needed to _talk. _He was feeling anxious and off balance, as though things had happened too easily for him, and things had been too easy.

Harry sat, not eating as the plates filled with sandwiches and pasties and his fellow Gryffindors took their seats as far away from Plague Harry as possible. Darkness wasn't contagious, hopefully neither was idiocy. Crabbe and Goyle had entered the hall some time ago, always the first for lunch, but they were no longer the Malfoy heralds and Draco couldn't be relied upon to lead where they followed. So he waited until students began filtering out again, the plates cleaned themselves and vanished into the woodwork, but still no Draco Malfoy to discuss his recent and excited discovery. Harry went looking for him. Tracing the route to Slytherin common that had become so familiar, he spat a string of curse words for faulty memory and eventually the password as it came to him, and the concealed door slid open and shoved aside the armor-guardian.

Draco was found in his bed, curled under the green duvet like a very small child, and there the analogy ended because he looked in no way innocent or adorable. Malfoy's face was pointed, creased in a scowl, his hands clutched a pillow with the ferocity he normally reserved for viciously mocking Harry or in later times the oblivious student populous of Hogwarts. Harry rested a hand against Malfoy's shoulder, shaking him gently in the hope to wake him up, but only succeeded in making him groan and throw the blanket over his head. "Malfoy?"

A groan. "Hey, hey Draco, C'mon Malfoy. Wake up." Draco was up and moving before his eyes had registered consciousness. There was something to be said for his reflexes, the bow-string reflexes demonstrated by only the truly exhausted, but the way he sat up and scrambled to the headboard left a strange twinge of remorse in Harry.

"Are you okay?" Potter grew more focused with each passing moment, like an arrow perusing its quarry he woke Malfoy from the memory with a jolt. Potter was sharp, and impatient, like a razor's edge, focused and belligerent as only Harry could be. He was awake and cold; the throbbing pain in his arm that burned its way from his mark to his shoulder, infecting his bloodstream with the ugly black pain of pure power had been blacklisted to a half-conscious awareness of pain in his entire body. Draco didn't understand why this was happening to him, he'd gotten back from his rendezvous the other night with barely a scratch, nothing broken, nothing wrong, and now here was Potter. "Don't worry, I won't touch you."

"Harry?" He couldn't focus, he couldn't breathe properly, he was uncomfortable and achey, he reached for Harry, touched his wrist, and gasped against the pins and needles the touch brought to him because he wanted to hold, touch, never let go, and part of him realized that to be thinking it he was still half asleep. Draco's dark mark throbbed, black around his arm which had been scratched and bruised until it was no longer Malfoy-pale but the approximate color of a fruit medley, bruised, red in places, and blotchy. Voldemort, Voldemort was attacking his arm, it was a personal vendetta – Draco shook off the nightmare. Psychosomatic delusion brought on by guilt and uncertainty and he visibly shook himself away from the dream state he'd previously inhabited. He was Draco Malfoy, in perfect control of the situation and the idiocy with his left arm was in fact idiocy that was disappearing like the nightmare it was. Just the after effects of a miserable week manifesting itself in the only way his mind could process: this was nothing. "I daresay you needn't go that far. But he's happy… I think something has made the Dark Lord very happy."

"Well good." A manic sort of smile crept across Harry's too-thin face, transforming the normal dimple that rested there into a gruesome crevice and his earlier concern was forgotten because Draco didn't look as though he needed a verbal beating about avoidance and ditching their classes together. "I'm happy too." And he was, which somehow seemed wrong. Lonely, depressed, irritable Potter made so much more sense. It was strange being in Potter's good graces. He had something planned, Malfoy could sense it. He felt the pain in his bones, and he saw Harry through eyes that didn't seem to be his own, and wondered if he was possessed. But Voldemort didn't need to possess him, and something about the week of vacation looked at in retrospect had made Draco realize that he was, in fact, happy, and had only been tormenting his followers and various victims for the sheer joy of doing so.

Malfoy straightened up and leaned heavily against him, hardly daring to breathe his throat was so raw and his head swam, it had only been a nightmare and the mauling pain in his left arm was imaginary. Harry had him by the shoulders, holding him steady and acting as a firm tether to reality, but Draco wasn't entirely sure he liked the look of the thing. The pain in his arm was contained by Harry's hand, held firmly in place at his shoulder joint and Harry's hand enabled him to breathe enough to muster sarcasm and the true irritability in his system. Harry sitting comfortably on his bed in a comfortable tableau that Draco frequently had nightmares about when he managed to sleep. He was enthused, and terrifyingly intent, Malfoy wanted to look away and regain control of himself but he was shaking too badly. "He wants to kill you, you daft prig."

"I assume we're talking about Voldemort? Well, I'll admit, that doesn't make me very happy, but I want to kill him too so we're even." Potter was practically levitating out of his seat, and Draco ignored his sense of impending doom and forced his left hand to move away from the limp hold on Harry's thin wrist into his own lap. Harry continued, "While you were… away I went down to the kitchens to… eat, and I have some good news."

Draco rolled his eyes, food. Potter had come to rescue him from unimaginable pain to talk about food. The sharp ache in his arm had all but receded to an itch again and he was irritated with himself for reacting so, an affliction brought on by a modicum of self-sacrificing nonsense and martyrdom that seemed infectious around Potter. The guilt and queasy sense of misdirection had him tied up in knots, it was just his brain effectively kicking his ass, the confusion and pain from the cruciatus finally processing itself and using his mark as a physical manifestation. Draco's own reassurances did more in the world than Harry's hand on his elbow ever could, he kept telling himself that because going mad was only all right when it didn't make a difference. He would be killing Voldemort, he was fucking around with Potter, he was betraying his family, Harry was so much closer than his family now – it had been guilt, Voldemort was happy. The younger Malfoy had all but delivered him to the Dark Lord, and the pain was the unknown gift of his betrayal. "Let me guess." He started wryly, pointedly ignoring that even the itching was subsiding now and that awful twelve hours had passed in a blur of sleep, "You've found the Magnificent Pineapple of Destiny and it's in someone's dog kennel?"

"Sort of." Harry chirped in response, dropping that incredible soothing grip to Draco's wrists now that he was suitably awake, "It's a Bacchus Flute, and it was in cold storage."

"It's a what…?"

"A Bacchus Flute."

"Yes yes, I know that, but… you found it in cold storage?" Draco was suitably perplexed and Harry could feel his spirits sinking once again – it seemed ludicrous. It WAS ludicrous. Everything he'd ever come across so easily had come at a cost, and it made him leery, sad, because now that the house elf had placed a solution in his hands killing Voldemort could never work.

"Seems silly doesn't it?" Harry shrugged and backed up to the other side of the bed, leaning against one of the posts and placing his shoes on Draco's coverlet. The blonde frowned and Harry didn't care. "Things like this… they don't happen. So it can't be real. I just thought I should tell you."

Malfoy frowned contemplatively and tried to ignore the feeling of drowning in Harry's sudden wash of realism. "Buck up golden boy, this luck's no different from the rest of your adventures." He said genuinely, holding Harry to that edge of sarcasm that suggested his entire life had been a farce and there was no reason it shouldn't continue to be so. "Let's not look a gift horse in the mouth, shall we?"

* * *

Dude, he actually said "shall we?" god - I'm only that bitchy when... well. Nevermind, I don't think I'd ever take that arch tone with anybody I'd gotten off on the couch in Gryffindor. Which is a pretty narrow description. Then again, it is Draco. Anyway - Oh my god! Plot! ….Okay, I kindof like this chapter in spite of myself, the Tonks segment is just too depressing for words… and also fucking funny. 


	29. Communicating

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Harry Potter (novels, industry, products, movies, person, etc.) that honor belongs to Scholastic Books and JKRowling – clearly if I owned Harry Potter (again, novels, industry, products, movies, people, etc.) there would be a lot more porn. … and just possibly banana fritters.

**Author's Notes: **It's a double header! … I'm bored, and it's snowing (in fecking April! That's just wrong!) and I'm supposed to be dying Easter eggs but I'm waiting for my friend instead etc. So I'm posting – happy Easter, if you're not Christian or not a fan of blatant commercialism (particularly those white chocolate crosses… because those things are just freaky, hysterically blasphemous and freaky) "happy spring solstice". Just a note - I really hate this first segment – I mean, okay I guess the chapter's important and blah blah blah, but the first segment… just seems so Emo. But the bit with "Merlin Potter, ever heard of toenail shears?" Cracks me up every single time I read it ... you know, it occurs to me that this story may be viewed by some as incredibly depressing... and those people are not wrong, but I laughed harder writing this story than I do watching most sit-coms, or anything relatively campy. ... aaah to have a twisted sense of humor. In light of that - you can find the entire, re-edited, uncut archive (this will include some more NC-17 scenes in later chapters) at Malf0yM0nkeys. Come visit, and to everyone that gives me feedback I wish the craziest ideas/inspirations ever to have landed in your brain. It's a fire, go with it.

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Chapter 29 - Communicating

He was lonely, so lonely, and sad, and tired in a way that he had never been tired before. There was nothing for him now, no home to return to, no family to bemoan his existence, no muggles in the world to hate him, no kindly old men to convince him that maybe his life was worth something after all. His friends had gone, his memories of them were fleeting and distant, leaving him to wonder if they'd ever been at all. He was dying somehow, through Voldemort who had his eye on no uncertain murder for some time, through Quidditch where it would be oh-so-easy to slide off his broom in front of a thousand stunned spectators, through time to whose inevitable grasp he would eventually fall. He was dying and he felt it worming inside his bones and stealing his heartbeats away from activity and purpose; sand stripping him of his flesh and nicking at his bones.

He had no right to share in their lives. No right to call himself a true friend to them, nor the ability to call himself a human, to share in their grief or mourn their losses with them. Harry was their tool, he was the wand, or the mascot, or just the stupid bit of rice that caught in the back of the throat and murdered innocently. He was just a method of survival, hardly human to begin with, and doing this, doing this was the only way he could think to escape the never ending sense of responsibility as people that hadn't been designed like he had died for the very same reason, died.

The knife was hot and cold and liquid in the way that only steel can be. It didn't reflect the hand that held it – it didn't bandy words and make false accusations against its possessor. The knife was a knife was a knife – good and evil didn't matter to it. The skin beneath the knife was blue, and purple and silver, and translucent and the knife did the job it had been created to do, plunging beneath the waiving milk surface of his skin with fire and ice. Harry Potter had not considered suicide. He had never thought to kill himself even as the hand solidifying around the handle of that oh-so-effective weapon became his own, even as the soft black template of his mind became red and mercurial, and puddled around his feet in a shining and uneven pool that hadn't sunk into the fabric yet. Even as he felt himself flooding away Harry Potter had not ever considered suicide.

He felt his heart pounding. Felt the inevitable panic of death, that desperate last attempt to save his own soul from eternal hell, and the horrible thought that no, he didn't want to die. Nothing on earth was worth sacrificing his life for, and even in misery and pain he wanted to live. Live. He understood Nicholas Flammel, he understood Voldemort, he understood the absolute terror in Sirius' eyes when he fell backwards, stunned and into the unknown. It was unknown. Harry didn't want to die and the knife slipped away, dissolving in his hand like arsenic, green and crumbling as his fist loosed its hold.

Where was he in this? A breeze said outside, the stillness in the air said in, somewhere he would be found? Some corner where no soul could come across him in time to save his life – Harry didn't want to die in this black unknown, he didn't want to die at all. Where was Malfoy to stay his hand and berate him, and hold his arm together, hold him together, while he died and died – since when had he relied on Malfoy to be his keeper? But Malfoy wouldn't be touched, and would never come to find him here, wherever here was, because this was his mess and Draco Malfoy was a firm believer in sorting out ones own messes.

Ron was staring at him scowling from that horrible pool of body fluid that he stared into now, aghast. Not his parents who were gone now from mind, not Sirius who had been replaced by the more recently deceased in sorrow. And the image of his friend flickered into Hermione, who was standing with her arms across her belly that bulged with a child that she claimed was Neville's – screaming, screaming not the silent pain she had before in Dumbledore's office when it was all Harry could do to stand against the horrible weight of Ginny and Marjorie and Ron, but screaming long and loud and she was old and haggard until Hermione's face became McGonagall's. The woman sighed, and Harry did not look away for long before the pool flickered again, another drop from his mutilated wrist stirred its surface. Voldemort was laughing with eyes brighter and more vibrant than they had ever been before, still red reflected in his own life's blood, still evil as the whole world shriveled under his gaze and Harry's idiocy flooded it all in a tsunami of grief and liquid from his untimely suicide.

Harry sat up in the grey light of dawn; his hand flew to his wrist which was perfectly normal and unscarred save the tiny puncture scar he'd received during detention in the green houses so long ago. His breath caught and the wave of panic he'd been fighting dissipated into a cloud. Nightmare, a frequent occurrence and no less damaging for the routine. This wasn't suicide, this would work, this had to work. He wasn't killing himself, he hadn't sacrificed friends and his skeletal family for the perverse pleasure of dying. Stubborn anxiety took him then and he scowled, he wasn't trying to kill himself no matter what anybody thought, no matter what Malfoy had to say, he wasn't trying to die. He refused to acknowledge that somewhere in the pit of his stomach lived a part of Harry Potter that didn't want to be a hero, and didn't want to solve the world's problems, and had simply found that the easiest out was at the hand of the enemy. This plan, however absurd, was going to work because he had nothing else and desperate impatience had him firmly in its thrall.

Harry fought down the anger that growled up in his throat as the words of imagination came back to sting him, chanting a vague reproach at his behavior and held on to the precious belief that despite everything the world said he was doing the right thing. Stubborn, yes he was stubborn, and damned if he would let the fickle mob convince him that this was wrong, this was crazy, this was suicide. He had an answer, he had a chance – if he didn't bet the lot then he was all the more a coward. Since Ron, and since Hagrid he had lost the ability to sit on his hands and wait for people to fix his problems – to hell with his nightmares because this was the only way Harry knew he had a chance. He had an in, he had a plan, and a sporting chance, he knew he was going to die eventually, and probably as a direct result of what he and Malfoy were trying but… he had to do something and damn everything if even his own head thought he was wrong.

Harry's foot hit the bedpost with a thump and the dull pain in his heel held the reassurance of reality that his dream had not. The undirected anger was what had him yanking into trousers and tugging on a shirt. Ron could scowl all he liked from his vantage point in the afterlife, but Harry was going through with this, and he moved from his empty four-poster to go eat breakfast in his isolation at the Gryffindor table. "Harry?" Came a sleepy voice as he turned the handle on his dorm, Neville was blinking at him, stupid with sleep, and Harry cringed as his dream of Hermione came at him from the depths of his mind. "Everything all right?"

"Yeah Nev."

He had to find Malfoy and end this thing as soon as possible. Now. It was driving him mad having to wait to confront Voldemort, and wait knowing that his chances were remote at best and having to muster the courage every day to not simply call it off. Like a wedding in some regards, neither party entirely positive that this was the best course of action but far too much in momentum to stop things, or a birth; it was time and there was no getting around it. Maybe this was how Neville felt every morning of his school career for five years, waking up to face the good Professor Snape and knowing that it was his worst fear wearing a scowl just for him. The analogy didn't quite hold water, because Harry and Neville both knew that Professor Snape would never intentionally harm a student, if only because of the liability to the school, and that Voldemort would never be remotely amusing, even in Matron Longbottom's hat.

Harry let his mind wander as his feet pursued their course to the dungeons. Malfoy had given him a sound verbal thrashing for not coming to him immediately with the information Dobby had given him, to which Harry replied that it was just after a specific instance in which Draco had fled like a bat out of hell and Harry thought it wiser not to disturb him lest he be hexed, and Easter break had gotten very much in the way. Draco rallied with an aristocratic sniff that Harry found incredibly poncy, and pointed out that Malfoy's do not flee. Harry thought it prudent to avoid a screaming row by simply taking his lumps and neglecting to mention that Draco had then been hiding from him because Malfoy's certainly do not hide. His temperance and foresight, however, was magnificently wasted when Draco let into him for not discovering the exact properties of the Bacchus Flute which, hardly fitting the elegant standards of an actual flute, had turned out to be a lopsided and lumpy little bowl that Dobby claimed could solve all of their problems. Draco then proceeded to nag his ear off while they trotted up to the kitchen to rectify his 3am mistake. "Mordred's Mother-in-law, Potter!" were Malfoy's exact words, which he only ever used when he was deeply upset, so he proceeded to expound on Harry's inadequacies until Harry was feeling approximately six inches tall and about to be squashed by a house-elf.

Malfoy had forgotten his anger though, sacrificing indignation in favor of amazement and nervy caution. Dobby had done them a great service, Bacchus Flutes were supposedly a popular trend among house elves in the 13th century for obvious hosting reasons, but the single set of complex magical mugs had dwindled down until there were only two remaining in the world. The Flute was the genuine article, designed to produce any liquid whether simple water or the viscous Elixir of Life, an alchemical miracle that in many ways went far beyond the abilities of the Philosopher's stone. It had been crafted by the beatific and reclusive cousins of the common house elf and was a breathtaking gift that seemed to shimmer with both magic and importance despite its aesthetic ugliness.

Harry had watched across the top of his water glass as Dobby explained everything to the son of his former master, excitedly gesturing and demonstrating by asking the Bacchus Flute in his reedy little voice to please provide him with the honeysuckle nectar and the cup promptly overflowed. "I has been using it for Winky sirs, but Harry Potter is needing it more." Harry felt a guilty twinge as the little house elf explained that the cup had belonged to his grandmother but he was giving it to his good friend Harry Potter because the wonderful Harry Potter would never use it for evil. Malfoy suppressed a snort, Harry cringed.

Dobby's series of revelations prompted the most categorical and meticulous book search thus far, delimiting the search to elf magic, specifically the Bacchus flutes and the various uses that had been discovered for them over the last eight centuries. Like all things of its chemical and magical nature, the softly-glowing porcelain tended to absorb the attributes of the things it was exposed to. With long-term exposure to poison, the Bacchus Flute would proceed to act exactly as it had for hundreds of years, producing the liquid desire of any possessor, but whatever it produced would be tainted by lethal poison for some time to come. Ordinarily genuine and potent exposure took years, Draco was expediting the process through the means of various charms and a magical gate, the corruption of the Bacchus Flute would only take thirteen days and nights, it was all Harry could do not to roll his eyes at the number.

He crawled into his bed sometime after third hour Transfigurations with the vague desire never to emerge from it and slept until his nightmare let him. Harry lived as a simple wizard, put two and two together, you get four: perfect for a bridge game, or better yet, assassinating the Dark Lord. In his happy world of non-theoretical magic you mushed strong smelling plants together in the right order and got results; all of the gate drawing and magic mixing was strongly Draco's forte and Harry kept well out of it. He didn't pretend to understand the magic, only knew that it worked, something thing they'd argued over when Harry demanded an explanation, only to later find that and explanation of the precise magicks at work would probably send his brain leaking through his ears and onto the flagstones. The benefit of using something as potent as Azrael's Mercy in a project like this was that the results would be lethal, but Harry kept his reservations and could only hope that whatever Malfoy had in mind would work, because he had no suggestions for improvement.

Malfoy had been particularly touchy of late and somehow Harry recognized this as his fault with no way to rectify the situation, so he was on his way to the dungeons, and probably on his way to more scathing remarks about his general competence. Malfoy wanted things done right, and in this instance Harry couldn't blame him, but knowing he had the appropriate weapon and having to wait to use it was pushing him to the very brink of self control. His feet had gotten out of the habit of shoes, and the castle stones were cool beneath them as Harry's patience finally ran its course. The ensuing argument was explosive, and Harry walked away with bleeding knuckles where he hit the wall.

* * *

"Merlin Potter, ever heard of toenail shears?"

"Sod off." Harry Potter could definitively say that he was not in the mood for witty banter about his toenails, excess paraphernalia, or comment on the state of his feet in general. He was balanced precariously on one leg, bracing himself against a stall in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom and performing a clumsy lift as Malfoy held his right foot firmly. It was still the perfect place for somewhat illicit extra curricular activities having nothing to do with fun because snogging students were soon intruded upon by the hormonal ghost and though the 6th year Gryffindor prefect was female and well aware of the isolated place, she studiously avoided it since Myrtle was torn between offering condolences for Ron and lamenting that it was not Harry who died and might have shared her toilet. So in perfect secrecy they had placed their cauldron sitting amidst twists and swirls of magic that marked their gate – occasionally the contents that Malfoy had fought to procure went 'blurp.'

The gate magic was an archaic and ridiculously complex process that easily could have easily substituted for a NEWT exam in Ancient runes, but Harry maintained that it needed to be done, and so they did. The spell was to be performed precisely two days past the full moon, cauldron handle pointing south west, and seventeen twigs laying in a tee-pee turned towards the East; but Harry didn't need to understand the magic to know that it worked, he knew "Potter, if you step on that rune I'll cut your balls off and feed them to the squid" and that was good enough for him. So he humored Draco by hovering in this ridiculous and awkward ballet pose while Malfoy traced runes and swirls on the floor of Moaning Myrtle's bathroom, first in chalk, then with his wand, muttering to the four wind gods and chanting something obscure in Latin as the whole thing came to life.

The gate was designed to weave opposing spell components together, and with a little tinkering it worked on liquids too; soon the near powdery contents of Azrael's Mercy that they'd patiently scraped from the crucible, a decaying agent that would slowly tarnish and pit the surface of the Bacchus Flute and would make the poison more effective and the final ingredient, enough of Harry's own blood to set the potion boiling would be chemically bonded with magic as a directive. When the magicks were raised and the gate sealed the potion would be harmless to anyone that did not share Harry's blood – their somewhat graceless solution to the question of 'what if Voldemort decides to test it?'

Harry's Muggle-raised logic insisted that he and Voldemort did not share his actual DNA, and that Wormtail's hand could surely counter whatever influence he'd had in the Dark Lord's resurrection. Malfoy's pure wizard logic sneered in the face of Harry's, pointed out that in the realm of Muggle biology said resurrection was impossible, and that Harry should keep his mouth shut and bleed when told. The argument had degenerated into yet another screaming row until Malfoy smacked him in the face with the point behind this nonsense and firmly stated that if Voldemort tested it without the blood magic they'd be dead, and if it didn't work they would be dead; Harry sullenly shut up and agreed to bleed when told; happy to be doing something at last.

The cauldron was steaming very gently and Draco had kept a handkerchief over his mouth and nose to avoid the foul smell. Harry had not been granted the same courtesy and was squirming uncomfortably with the knowledge that there was a glutinous and possibly corrosive sludge only inches beneath his numbing foot. The kitchen knife in Malfoy's hand was scratching at his ankle bone, leaving a network of tiny thin lines and score marks that would bubble up and become red without procuring a drop of the pint they needed for this spell to work. "What is it, exactly, that you're doing? Trying to tickle it out of me?"

Malfoy fidgeted and tossed Harry a glare as he scored a somewhat harder line in Harry's ankle that welled up with blood and garnered them a tiny drop. "I don't exactly want to _hurt _you." He said stubbornly and went back to the excruciatingly tedious task of collecting Harry's blood.

They'd chosen the feet because they tended to bleed profusely with minimal damage, and very few people asked questions if you showed up to class with a scratch on your ankle instead of a slit wrist, but this was becoming ridiculous and Harry's hip had started to ache with the strain of keeping his leg aloft. "How thoughtful Malfoy, you're the soul of courtesy." He braced himself against the bathroom wall and wrestled the knife from Malfoy's limp grasp and thrust it point-first into the soft spot just below his ankle bone. It was cold and Harry could feel the blood leave his face in a wash of little tingles as goosebumps were raised on his skin up to his shoulders, flooding down to his ankle and making him slightly nauseous.

"Fuck! Merlin, Harry…" the blood was everywhere, wending down his foot and across Malfoy's pale fingers in rivulets so opaque it hardly seemed real. Malfoy had no problem inflicting pain, he was ordinarily quite good at it, but this brutal and physical expression of magic was personally abhorrent; his variety of agony lay firmly in the mental and emotional anguish he could inflict. Things like roughing people up and breaking thumbs for information he left to Crabbe and Goyle in the past, and now apparently to Potter. Malfoy was shaking as he dug the knife point from Harry's ankle and braced the Gryffindor's foot against his chest to steady him.

The potion began to smoke and spat sparks of aquamarine light as blood fell away from Harry's foot in a sticky dribble and stained the front of Malfoy's robes. A purplish green fog hovered around the pewter rim before spilling over the side as Draco drew up the wards one-handed, letting the magic draw itself together in intricate patterns around the cauldron, sealing itself as the liquids swirled and twisted around each other like oil and vinegar until Malfoy dropped the Bacchus Flute into the pot with a small 'plunk' and released everything with a sharp jerk.

The wards and rune-weave held but Harry didn't. He couldn't swallow, felt searing heat in his ankle as one of the azure sparks sunk through the weave of his jeans and seemed to burn his flesh from the inside out, couldn't breathe as the fog turned thick and greasy in his lungs and he started feeling dizzy. Harry fell away from the cauldron and the bathroom stall coughing and wheezing when Malfoy let his foot go and the ammonia-white fog rolled across the floor wrapping around his lungs and eating away at his skin. Harry crawled away from Myrtle's bathroom dragging his foot behind him and waited slumped outside the door gasping and choking back the vomit he felt welling in his throat as the occasional confused portrait leaned down in its frame to ask after his health. Malfoy emerged moments later with a scowl and sealed the door behind him. What little fog had been seeping from beneath the door was abruptly recalled and Harry's lungs felt suddenly clean as the door locked with an audible click and Harry, who found he could breathe again, stared up in awe. "What did you do?"

"A simple containment spell you dolt. A first year could have done it." Malfoy was scowling darkly in his direction while he used a few of the bathroom tissues to wipe Harry's blood from his hands and threw the dirty rags bodily at Harry before moving to help him with his ankle.

Harry rolled his eyes while Draco scowled and fumbled around the hem of his trousers, holding the skin of Harry's ankle together with a thumb. It was hardly his fault that he couldn't think clearly in the bathroom, the knife in Malfoy's hand was a surreal reminder of his increasingly bizarre nightmares, and the fog hung in his lungs like grease and lead until he could not breathe around the nausea and the dizziness. He was feeling so much better now, even before the gentle heat that Malfoy's wand sent zipping across his ankle before it seeped into the skin and the cramp in his hip had fallen away to a dull throb that held the comfortable physicality of non-magic. "Could a first year have done that?"

Draco smirked, "Maybe if he weren't in Gryffindor."

Harry chuckled dryly and rearranged his robes to cover his bloody and charred trouser leg. He would have to change before anyone saw him, the potion they'd spent the afternoon assembling left sticky residue all over his clothes and a hole in his shirt where he'd accidentally spilled a drop of corrosive acid while Malfoy laughed at his plight. "Don't suppose you have any chocolate on you?"

Malfoy shook his head and Harry shrugged. He hated chocolate with a passion but because he felt as though he had walked through the entire headless society, or had possibly met a Vampire at the corner store, that a little chocolate might have helped. Malfoy had proven surprisingly resourceful at acquiring chocolate and candy in general from the miscreant youth of the castle, and offered what was in his pocket, "Fizzing whizbees?"

"No." Harry pushed himself to his feet and away from the rather awkward seating at the girl's bathroom. It was funny to think, chocolate had essentially earned him his first friend in Ron Weasley and had found Nicholas Flammel for them. It endeared him to Professor Lupin, introduced him to the unusual company of his father's friends. Chocolate had provided this strange and miraculous substitute for the philosopher's stone, and with the endorsement of chocolate Harry felt strangely reassured; it was a cornerstone of the fantasy world that allowed him his new and glorious life in wizardom and its absence made Harry apprehensive. "How long do we wait before the cup is ready?"

"Thirteen days." Was Malfoy's reply. Thirteen, of course it would be thirteen, and Harry could feel himself rolling his eyes without a thought, the magic was so thoroughly predictable. They had argued earlier about that as well, and while their arguments were never few and far between this one had been particularly impassioned. Harry wanted to get on with it, move forward and kill the Dark Lord (or himself) in the quickest manner possible. Malfoy wanted to wait, to plan, to research, to know absolutely that they couldn't fail, and Harry had curtly informed him that he'd be waiting until Voldemort died of old age. It hadn't been particularly pointed, no accusations of political agenda and no cruel references to dead parents, their fighting had been refined to the simple point of 'you're a bloody idiot and you're going to get me killed,' until a compromise could be drawn: they never managed to compromise.

"We should go to Hogsmeade." Harry hadn't been since before Christmas. Not because it was too hard to sneak away, if anything the staff at Hogwarts could care less what he did with his time, he went to his classes and that was apparently enough. The students were still being escorted from class to class, Mad-Eye Moody was still pacing in his jerking limp across the entrance hall, scanning students warily for devious grins or dark allegiances, but it was just motions, no one had been attacked since February, and how easy it is to forget in a month, in two. He didn't stay away from the village out of respect, not because it was the last place Ron was alive, he stayed away for the simple reason that he had no motivation to go. No excuse to visit Honeydukes as long as the kitchens were open, no reason to sip butterbeers across a table, and no one to enjoy said butterbeers with.

"Why?"

"Why not?"

"Right." And some time later when they were seated around a table to the astonishment of the local bar tender, leaning with their heads so close together when Malfoy said "Potter?" and Harry turned to reply his lips brushed the shell of Draco's ear, he had never really been so content. "You're paying."

Harry laughed and felt better than he had in days.

* * *

Luann and Peter Pelgrave had not taken the news their son's death lightly. The man that had killed their son was not, in fact, a death eater and had never previously sought to harm another human being. He was merely a member of the Devonshire Herbology Society, and the unfortunate victim of a juvenile prank left to mock the Ministry as Voldemort eluded them again. All 42 members of the DHS had been at the country chateau that the ministry had unsuccessfully raided; Kynan Richmond, the man that killed the unfortunate Pelgrave was the owner.

Auror Michael Pelgrave was awarded a posthumous Merlin: Third Class. It was a bit insulting to his unfortunate parents and the Auror that trained him who argued that despite the embarrassing nature of the raid, Pelgrave had nonetheless died in the cause of duty and therefore deserved a Merlin: First Class as was tradition for those who died on the job. Had Tonks not been so busy lobbying to save her own job she may have had more of a mouthful for the bureaucratic sod that had stinted the Pelgrave family. She had personally delivered the news to Michael's parents, his father shook her hand, his mother burst into quiet tears and nodded that she had known all along.

There would be a trial for Richmond. The poor man had been distraught when he'd regained consciousness. It was, after all, his home and the current DHS headquarters that had been raided, it was his wand that (in arguable self-defense) killed the young auror. The source of this terrible misinformation would be dug down to its roots and end; every member of the ministry knew too well that the Internal Investigations Department would find nothing but rubbish. It was a witch hunt that desperate parents and a desolate society allowed, seeking to find someone, anyone to harangue beyond their limits. The IID would dig and dig until they found anything, questionable morals, an affair some five years ago with no motive, but they would not find Death Eater activity. Voldemort excelled at smoke and mirrors, tracking him down had all the effect of beheading a ghost, but they had to try.

The gleeful mocking the Daily Prophet employed against the nightmarish raid on the Devonshire Herbology Society had done nothing for morale. They spent a good deal of page space happily expounding on the ministry's failures both recent and old, going so far as to cite the 1973 fairy-dust upset. It was a ridiculous waste of press, and a painful reminder that Voldemort knew the ministry tactics too well. Her return from the raid had been a difficult one – she had made her way to Scrimegeour's office with her head low and the hushed voices of her colleagues ringing in her ears. It was, however, not nearly as bad as it could have been, she had said quite succinctly "Sir, I'd like to make an official apology to everyone involved, and you'll have my resignation on your desk by Monday."

Rufus Scrimegeour, however, was less than thrilled about that particular course of action. "You will do no such thing – Tonks, you're a fine auror and what's more a competent lieutenant, the truth is I wish I had twenty more like you," Tonks mentally excused her clumsiness from this estimation. "You were acting on misinformation – if there had been death eaters in that mission it would have been the perfect sting and the whole ministry would be singing your praises about now."

"Thank you sir."

"You are going to be making that apology, and when that's through I want you to hunt down that informant. That man cost the justice department an Auror and ten thousand galleons in civilian reparation, but I'm not having one of my best aurors taking the fall for someone else's mistake." If that's what it was – the words hung unspoken, but it was clear to Tonks that Scrimegeour wanted the informant's head on a pike.

"Thank you sir."

Because of the Disastrous DHS Debacle, Tonks then 'officially' received the soundest verbal thrashing of her life from her superiors. This wasn't because they blamed her, or because they thought any of this mess was her fault, but simply because the 'reputed press' had mentioned her name in connection with the raid and the ministry needed to punish _someone _for the death of one of their aurors and the gross abuse of a citizen's rights or further lose their credibility.

Nymphadora Tonks was now off to make a report to The Order, to essentially say 'Thank you Albus, you were about as useful as a dead kitten,' and await more orders. It was days like this she found herself wishing she'd taken up gardening, or possibly become a dentist – they apparently had a lower suicide rate than aurors and made better money to boot.

* * *

"Hermione," Harry didn't particularly want to be doing this, he thought it was a waste of time, or he was too disgusted to really speak with her, but eventually this needed to be done. It wasn't as though he had a family, the thought of owling Dudley to say "in thirteen days I'm going to die, and I just wanted you to know that… well, I can't say I've ever particularly cared for you, but you should know that none of my funeral expenses will be your responsibility." The thought sent him into paroxysms of laughter, sobered only by how much it would hurt Mrs. Weasley to read a second one, perhaps more sympathetic or in his current state perhaps not – she would ask him why. She would floo straight to Dumbledore's office demanding answers because Harry was perfectly healthy and the hand she'd added during the summer had been pointing to mortal danger for months simply because he was Harry Potter and semantics got in the way.

It left him, by the law of elimination, with Hermione, who was family only in the respect that they'd been friends for five years and she had probably managed to save his life on more than one occasion. Harry seriously doubted that he and Hermione Granger had anything to say to each other, the logical arguments that had supported their friendship for so long now seemed null. Sometimes friendships just died unexpectedly, like Ron, and there was nothing about her that Harry could honestly say he liked anymore, right down to the points of her sensible shoes. He had no intention of telling her this, she would blame it on Malfoy, perhaps rightly so; and he had no intention of telling her she was right, that Malfoy was going to get him killed or just how willing a participant in his own destruction he was going to be.

Harry could almost hear the argument building against him in her head, 'you've sided with Malfoy' who was a plague unto himself and remarkably unattached to Voldemort in all their years of association. Malfoy had been the first person to really challenge them all, and the person to give Hermione her first true insult in the Wizarding world; the fact that 'mudblood' rang with the approximate juvenile equivalent of 'retard' was of little significance. Arguably, Draco Malfoy was still the most irritating, insulting, Semitist twit they'd ever known, his latest stance having been along the lines of 'of _course _muggles are inferior to wizards, I just happen to think Voldemort is going about it all wrong,' but Harry would take what he could get. Malfoy was going to be Malfoy no matter what Harry's current assassination plans, and Hermione's hatred of him was just as valid as Harry's use for him. The thought sat heavily in his stomach and made him queasy about the whole thing.

Perhaps he should have talked to Hermione first, Harry's reasons for not doing so were becoming increasingly unclear, but she had been frustrated by his seeming coldness, and absorbed so completely by Ron's death that she had made herself utterly unavailable to assist in his revenge, if it could even be called revenge. Their friendship hadn't been the same since Ron, and when he lay in bed in sleepless January thinking of all the things he should be doing and couldn't bring himself to, it wasn't Hermione and Ron that sprang to mind, or anyone. Only the all-encompassing idea of 'being done'; being done with Voldemort no matter what, and Mrs. Weasley's clock that should never have to point to Mortal Danger again because of him. He hadn't thought of Ron and Hermione so it should have come as no surprise when Hermione turned away from him at the memorial service for Ron, and it should have then followed that when Hagrid was declared dead, and that he decided he could stand no more it wasn't Hermione he turned to. Was he doing this for Ron and Hagrid after all, or simply for himself? because he was lazy and tired, and too exhausted to spend another year on a wild goose chase that only resulted in nightmares for all of them. It was all a bit hazy but to him it made sense if he simply didn't involve them because none of them should have to do that again – Malfoy was there, with nothing to lose, and willing to actively pursue that inevitable death that Hermione protested. Malfoy was there, Hermione hadn't been.

Harry would compromise everything by letting it slip at all that there was a plan brewing in the girl's bathroom on the second floor, and Hermione would ruin everything by telling Dumbledore. But there was still a need for confrontation, a sort of stuffiness in his head, the very strong urge to clear the air between them before he went marching off to his death, and he suspected that this part should have been easy. He felt obligated to inform her that… which was where he lost the plot and couldn't remember what he'd intended to say. Maybe to apologize for all the ways he'd wronged her, or to speak against the evidence and say "look, I want you to know that we're still friends, and when I die, it's not your fault," because Hermione blamed herself for everything, Harry knew. "We need to talk." Was what came out and he moved to sit beside her on the couch.

Hermione shot up as though burned, jerked to her feet scattering quills and her rolls of parchment around, residue from her intense studying habit. "Er…Sorry Harry!" Not fear, or panic, but disgust, and anger, and resentment, and the pure urge to avoid Harry Potter made her leap to her feet with a hurried excuse "I can't talk now, I'll be… late for Ancient runes," and presumably towards Hufflepuff where Marjorie waited nearer the Hospital Wing than Gryffindor. Harry found himself muttering about poor excuses and only wanting to make amends before sighing into the couch and spending the rest of the night asleep with his head uncomfortably balanced on the arm.

* * *

Hermione is a coward, neener neener neener! ...sorry, school yard antics ahoy - it's easter. I'm dying eggs. I'm a big kid. Review and I'll make you a pretty egg in your favorite color! 


	30. Waiting to Exhale

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Harry Potter (novels, industry, products, movies, person, etc.) that honor belongs to Scholastic Books and JKRowling – clearly if I owned Harry Potter (again, novels, industry, products, movies, people, etc.) there would be a lot more porn. … and just possibly banana fritters.

**Author's Notes: HAHA! FINALLY! I AM ALLOWED TO POST! **Right, so the title of this chapter, I have NO idea what I was thinking, something along the lines of "Well bugger me... for once in my life I don't have a completely random chapter title waiting to spring to mind…" but in retrospect it's pretty appropriate. This is an odd chapter, parts of me really like it, other parts of me say "Gah! NO!" but hey, that's what I feel about the whole story. There's some fighting, and it makes no sense, but I figure, fights start over little things right? And most of them are meaningless anyway. And there's sap. Or at least my definition of Sap… which is to say not really… but I tried damnit. What can I say, I'm not big on the sap. In light of that - you can find the entire, re-edited, uncut archive (this will include some more NC-17 scenes in later chapters) at Malf0yM0nkeys (that would be my LJ). Come visit, and to everyone that gives me feedback I bequeath elephants. No, really.

**Special Thanks For: **

**PaddycakePadfoot: **There should be laws against me doing things like this, but your egg is here: http // i13. tinypic. com/ 30m 1elz. jpg just remove all the spaces and you've got your Easter Egg as promised :D. I took an actual egg (I really was dying them) photographed it, played with the colors, and did a lot of cropping/copying/pasting. Yes, I am a nerd. About that spoiler… if you want another massive spoiler, I am (completely in spite of myself) a sucker for a happy ending – so there will be one. I'm really happy you were amused by the clichés – Chekov's gun (even though I was thinking – oh god, this is so crap, this is so random, it sort of worked. Meh), the thirteen days etcetera. I was actually going to do thirteen little moments between Harry and Draco before the showdown, except… then I lost track of what I was doing and decided against it. It's amazing… considering how long this story is, and that there are months covered in a single chapter, that it takes 2 to actually get to the showdown with Volemort. And then… there's all this build up, there's 32 chapters of anticipation… and I left most of the actual magical science to the imagination. I'm not even sure I described it well, much like the Bacchus flute I leave a lot of it to future chapters to be detailed, and yet, in spite of these things, and in spite of my constantly assuring you that I am an unorganized and unpracticed writer, you keep coming back for more, and I just can't tell you how grateful I am. That there's someone in the world that's laughing at the things that I'm laughing at, and for that matter somebody that can sift through the drivel and the mental-babble to the important bits of the story, there's an incredible sense of relief and elation. Thanks again, so very much and so very sincerely, for reading.

**HJP: **I couldn't answer your question :D because well… reviewing your own story is tacky, but that number is all the better for your contribution, so thank you. – I would've done you an Easter egg, but you didn't tell me what color you wanted.

**BlackCorridor: **Hah, right you are about the angsty bits, to be perfectly honest I think I started this story when I was 17 and just about to off myself :D Fortunately I've long-since grown out of that, and still managed to keep the same tone. It is angsty, it's also brutally circular because I keep coming to the same points, but if you make it this far, to chapter 30 (yipes!) I applaud you and thank you so very much for reviewing. (Ambitions of a Dead Ballerina is maybe my favorite chapter… just because I feel for Narcissa, I really do).

**PapillionBleu: **I know! I'm sorry… I killed Ron, and yes, I feel guilty. Actually, one of the greatest delays in this story was the murder of Ron Weasley – I'd written a lot of things after, and of course all of the chapters before, but I just couldn't bring myself to kill Ron, and when I did it was really abrupt. I mean one moment he's happy and chatty, the next minute he's dead and if you space out then you completely miss it. Which… might be a good thing, might be a bad – either way I felt horribly guilty doing it (I had a serious crush on Ron Weasley when I read the first and second books… when I was 12). Hopefully by now I've gotten the point across on Ron's death – because with him there Harry never would've fallen into cahoots with Draco and… this story wouldn't be happening. I had to kill him, and I cried.In other news, thanks so much for reading! If you've made it this far I commend you – I don't know if it's because I wrote it, or because I'm just not very patient, but I can't re-read this story. It's not that I know what's going to happen, that's not a problem, it's just that I can't sort through my own prose and I find myself getting sleepy as I read so none of it makes sense :D… sad face. Anyway, thanks so much for reading, and I hope you've enjoyed the story to-date.

* * *

Chapter 30 - Waiting to Exhale

"You don't actually taste the food do you? You just shove it in your mouth and swallow." There is something about kitchens. All kitchens, from the very smallest campfire to the most successful metropolitan restaurant; something about kitchens that makes them the heart and soul of life, as though they produce more than the mere sustenance on which mortals survive. If countries and regions were somehow architecture Tibet would be the attic – the place where people store seemingly important bits of information to get lost and dusty until generations later some wandering eremite stumbles upon it – the kitchen, however, would be Africa. The place where life and civilization began, that initial spark nestled in and amongst rivers and lush forests where there's always something new simmering on the pot and cures for formerly-incurable diseases are nearly tripped over, the place where eremites came from. Kitchens breed life.

"Hey! I do taste it." And even Harry had to admit his point as he was considering another mouth full mid-chew and chased the bite of his sandwich with a large gulp of pumpkin juice that hadn't actually touched his taste buds. He couldn't help it, he'd spent half his life as an emaciated mongrel and some unfortunate portion of him was trying to make up for lost time.

"Only when you belch." Harry laughed at that and stuck his tongue out before falling back into the steady rhythm of chew and swallow in silence.

Harry didn't want anyone to die. He realized that it was a 'necessary evil' of course, realized that without any form of an end that life would be appallingly boring, a waste of bio matter, but… in this one instance it would be okay if Malfoy didn't die. Harry didn't want him marching off to war with a wand in hand and a picture of his mother in his breast pocket. He blamed Narcissa Malfoy entirely for her son's choices – had she not died he would have been a complete and utter twat for the rest of his days, and had she not died they would not be having this conversation, this comfortable moment where Draco Malfoy saw fit to lightly tease Harry Potter for his eating habits and Harry Potter was simply charmed. Had she not died maybe there wouldn't be a Bacchus Flute, or a bloodspell, or any of the other things that would help them kill Voldemort, and perhaps it would not matter because Draco would have a future with or without him. They would never know about the bullet they'd dodged, the trainwreck they'd made of their lives and that was all right by him – to never have witnessed the moment when Draco had mustard dripping from his sandwich and hair hanging in his eye was worth it.

Harry blamed Narcissa Malfoy for a lot of things – it was cruel that someone with humors and talents beyond that of a bootlicking sycophant should be relegated to that very life. Harry would rather tie Malfoy to a chair and leave him in the disappearing cupboard than see him die like everyone else. "Malfoy… you're not… are you?" This made no sense of course, it was a question completely out of context as neither boy had said a word concerning '…' or '…', but this was often the affect of kitchens – forcing conversation, coherent or not.

They still continued to meet like this, in hallways and deserted corridors as though they'd been arranging clandestine meetings on the sly for years, and in a way they had. There was no more need of it, the work was over, endless hours in the library and frantic frustration was over as soon as it had begun and there was only the centuries-long wait between now and the terrifying then of Voldemort. Twelve days the eternity, it was agony. So though there was no need they ran to meet each other still, with no notion they actually were, and hadn't questioned each other when they fell steadily into step on their way into potions. It was after that nightmarish class and away from their suspicious professor with the knowing stare that Harry blurted his unlikely sentence. Draco looked up from his transfigurations textbook, a small bit of lettuce dangling from his lip, and blinked. "Er… I mean to say, you aren't helping me, um, just because… of your mother are you?"

The question had been weighing on his mind for some time and maybe he should have asked before, when he'd had the chance so many times before and he hadn't taken it. He didn't ask because of trust or some bizarre half-thought lack-there-of, but because Malfoy had no reason to do what he was doing except that he was doing it. Momentum that tended towards disastrous. His mother was the only apparent cause of his defection, and some resilient and 'good natured' little part of Harry that hadn't been thoroughly squashed by circumstance protested the lack of rationale. "I mean… why are you helping me?" Which was much clearer as questions went.

Malfoy swallowed his lettuce and was glaring. Harry felt an unusual stab of guilt somewhere between his heart and his stomach, maybe Malfoy was distantly related to Medusa, maybe if he just got angry enough looks really could kill and he wouldn't have to worry about Voldemort after all. "Why the hell do you care, Potter?"

"I don't, it's just…" Harry visibly cringed, then paused to compose himself; it had been a stupid question, the second it left his mouth he regretted it. No one had ever questioned Albus Dumbledore's motive, or Ron Weasley's, or his own. Kill Voldemort because he was your prized student, kill Voldemort because your best friend is counting on you, kill Voldemort: he killed your parents. If Neville Longbottom leapt into the fray screaming the names of his parents it would surprise no one, so why not Malfoy? Was his dead mother and mutilated childhood not enough? "You know what, forget I asked."

The sandwich hit the sideboard with a dry 'thwap' and Malfoy looked thoroughly irritated. "Is that not good enough for you Potter?" Harry blinked and shrugged guiltily, trying to reconcile the situation because he couldn't think what had Malfoy so worked up and it was an unexpected and abrupt change from their apparent truce. Harry was quite lost on the sea of malice and didn't expect to be found soon. "Is it too thoroughly cliché for you that I feel the need to do something because my mother killed herself to give me the… for me? Or is suicide too ignoble against Lily Potter's valiant sacrifice."

Defensive and awkward, hiding behind a panini, "It was just a question." And it had been just a question. Maybe one he should not have asked, maybe he was pressing Draco's patience, but damn it he was worried. Worried that maybe Malfoy was doing this for the wrong reasons, because he felt he had no choice and worried that maybe Malfoy was going to do this for all of the right reasons and Harry was wrong about everything and had to somehow compensate in virtue by asking stupid questions. How did it feel really, measuring audacity and altruism against the soulless Draco Malfoy to find himself lacking? It had only been a question.

"Fuck you Potter." The sandwich came up, a bite was ripped out of it, there was none of the previous enjoyment and reckless abandon of mustard that threatened to drip on Miranda Goshawk that prompted Harry to speak previously, and he wanted very badly to knock the sandwich away if Draco wasn't going to eat it properly. He continued: "Merlin, it's not as though you care. I could be trying to sacrifice death eaters to some asinine satanic ritual and you wouldn't give a bloody fuck so long as the job gets done, so shut the hell up and let me eat my lunch."

"Well it matters you prick! It's my life!" He was yelling back – definitely a 'back at you' sort of yelling but Harry honestly couldn't recall when Malfoy's voice slipped from waspish and demeaning into loud and perfectly executed snapping, but Harry was upping the ante in a full blown holler. "The last fifteen years have been for this and I don't want to die feeling guilty because you miss your mum and needed a pal or something."

"I think that is the most hypocritical thing I've ever heard and it would be really funny if it weren't so… revolting." Draco laughed completely without humor and Harry squirmed, it had absolutely been the wrong thing to say, most of what came out of his mouth was the wrong thing to say and he found himself wondering if major brain surgery to cut in a filter between his brain and mouth would be beneficial in the next twelve days. "This is exactly why I hate you. I spent my whole life… admiring this hero because he was good, and brave, and Harry bloody Potter, and then I actually meet you and you're a myopic little twerp that learned the difference between morals and duty from Ronald Weasley and a know-it-all mudblood – you wouldn't know real honor or courage if it smacked you on the nose."

"You don't get it! It's not about honor or morals, it's about doing what I have to do to get a fucking break! You don't know what he's really capable of and I'm not going to be responsible for killing another person! I just, I don't want to… you don't…" his sentence fizzled out and Harry found himself grunting in frustration and beating his hands against the air as though there were something horrible there to vent his anger on. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair that he'd lost Sirius, that he gave up his friends, that Ron walked into Hogsmeade to die and that Hermione went away. It wasn't fair that when he'd finally given up on being normal, when he'd given his life over to political agenda he had someone who was there and who understood his silence, someone who didn't waste time with jealousy and wouldn't ask the questions he couldn't answer. It was too much, and his whisper was drowned out in the sea of Draco's ire. "I don't want you getting hurt too."

"Do I look like fucking Longbottom to you Potter?" His voice was so low it made Harry wince, lessons in fury courtesy of Severus Snape, as demonstrated by Draco Malfoy. "I know exactly what he's capable of, in case you've forgotten; I didn't exactly hand him a blueberry muffin and whisper ideas about you joining him for tea – I'm the one that got you this stupid… interview Potter, and I'm the one with my ass on the line so don't try to tell me I don't understand!"

"So why are you?" He knew somewhere in the pit of his stomach that Malfoy had no intention of answering that question, and the icy silence directed at him only furthered the assumption but he had to say it. It happened so often these days, one of them would ask 'the question' they would have 'the argument' and it was all so stupid. He wanted to say that Malfoy didn't have to, wanted to say that nothing justified the complete and utter waste of his life and Harry needed him to not die for the sake of his sanity, but his mouth finally caught up to his brain and he could only stare back. Harry was useless, he wasn't worth shoving off the astronomy tower, he wasn't worth any of this and it rankled. Malfoy was right, at least, in that it really didn't matter. He could have been training for the circus with a Death Eater chorus line and it wouldn't have mattered in the slightest, but it just wasn't fair that Malfoy was willing to die for him too. Harry didn't want it, didn't deserve it, it wasn't fair and he was hopeless finding the words to say so.

But Draco surprised him, bit out an answer in spite of the obvious, and stared at him with something so far from malice Harry wondered if he was seeing it at all. Malfoy's face had always been expressive, vocal even in his attempts to remain impassive, and now he was glaring and hurt, "Because it needs to be done. My mother or yours, I don't want to wander around for the rest of my life hating everything because of stupid inaction. I don't have the luxury of letting others attribute me morals, oh great savior of the wizarding world, I had to do something myself."

He was incapable of doing anything on his own, it was always someone else that got him to where he needed to be and then they were gone, hurt, dead, or unhappy; simply gone, please let's move to Aruba, I just can't look at Harry Potter any more. It wasn't fair, Malfoy was refreshing, he was interesting and not as much of an ass as he pretended to be, and Harry would genuinely lose his mind if something were to happen, first to Sirius, then Ron, then Hagrid, thenMalfoy. It frustrated him to the core of his very being, he wanted to grind his teeth, and make fists, and scream obscenities into the air because he couldn't do anything about Sirius, or Ron, and now this whole thing was just ridiculous and it left him wondering how any of it could work and how they'd come up with such an idiotic notion in the first. He was inadequate, and tired, and afraid, and Harry felt helpless because he wanted to tie Malfoy to a chair and leave him in the dungeons before they both did something stupid. Just once he really needed to protect something and just this once he couldn't because Malfoy knew what he was doing and it wasn't Harry's choice. Ridiculous, and unfair, because Malfoy was right, and this time right was so very wrong. The argument that served no purpose and they just kept having it to hurt. "I'm sorry, I just… I'm sorry."

"Yes Potter, you really are."

* * *

She had a knack for finding the center of things, it wasn't hard to pinpoint the exact crux of a confrontation, the person on whom everything depended, the fulcrum of an argument, or the one thread that was going to pull the tapestry apart. Minerva McGonagall had seen her share of it all, tapestries, arguments, students embroiled in petty wars and she always waded in and grabbed the usurper by his ear, fifty points from Hufflepuff mister Borchardt for this shameless display of temper. And she had rarely been the cause, never the center of attention, never the seeker in the final match because that was not what she was good at. She was good at spotting the patterns: it made her an excellent chess player and a better transfigurations master.

It came as no surprise that she knew from the start which envoys would fail, which would succeed, and when the owls came flooding in from all over the world it was with very little hesitation that she read their messages because the part of Minerva that saw those patterns already knew what they said – down to the last punctuation mark. Albus Dumbledore had punctuation that drove her mad with its carelessness, little dots and slashes littered the page with wild abandon, making pause only for the words that were chosen with more care yet seemed no less sporadic. Very little made sense anymore, alumni she'd seen as uppity first years, pulling pranks and crying out for home had grown up and gone off, beloved pupils had turned dark and were the express interest of her instructions for Order, and the world seemed to have turned itself upside down once more.

So she sat staring at her list – unerringly punctuated by commas, colons, and semi-colons where appropriate – and thought desperately of the center of things. The ministry was doing its best against the never ending deluge of paperwork and calls from frantic and paranoid housewives about death eater sightings in their backyard but they had made little headway against the obvious threat. A few captured death eaters here and there, mostly supporters, no one with information that could benefit them, no one competent enough to warrant a place among the inner circle of Voldemort's brethren – the ministry was incompetently mating the pawns while the King sat in gloating anonymity.

Nymphadora Tonks wrapped up her lengthy report with a pointed sigh of frustration, admittedly attacking an unfortunate herbology society was not a shining moment in any auror's career, but there was little to be said or done about the misinformation. It was a catastrophe, it had already happened, and the only thing to do now was screen their information more carefully. Kingsley Shacklebolt was back on his feet, bullying the hapless victims of 'seated auror syndrome' into submission until the ministry cleared him for active duty once more: he at least would be diligent about Death Eater intelligence.

Severus was standing now, glaring across the room like he'd been personally insulted by the presence of every man and woman there. Not entirely surprising, the simple existence of Alastor Moody would insult many a friendlier man than Severus Snape. Minerva found herself glaring back from habit. He had been charged with the not-so-simple task of rooting out any pits of evil from within Hogwarts, a personal affront to his sensibilities she was sure. It was a sad thing for any Hogwarts professor to realize the scamps they taught had the potential to turn rotten, even worse hearing it from the mouths of others, but as the head of Slytherin House, Severus was in the best position to garner such information. Though far from exclusive traits, the pride, paranoia, and competitiveness that seemed inherent in Slytherin made them somehow more prone to darker magics; as Hagrid had succinctly put it several times "There's not a single witch or wizard who went bad who wasn't in Slytherin." Dead wrong, but only by a margin, and so Severus had been asked to look carefully towards his own students, noting particularly any strange bruises near their left arms.

"Few of the students have actually been marked," Snape was saying in his blunt and caustic way, "but they're still His. Hogwarts has never made a practice of making the Slytherins feel welcome. Mister Malfoy is marked, Mister Goyle is marked… Vincent Crabbe is showing signs of… resistance, I'll be speaking with him shortly." Minerva wondered, cruelly, what Vincent Crabbe could do one way or the other – the boy was thicker than a brick shithouse and there was nothing he could offer either side, his loyalties were not a viable use of resources, but she wisely kept her mouth shut. "The Ravenclaw Turpin belongs to the Dark Lord, as do the Gryffindors O'Brien and Potter."

There was a gasp, covered by the convenient post-moon coughing of Remus Lupin as he absorbed the shock of everyone. It was no real surprise, they had all had their suspicions since Yule but hearing it so bluntly stated with no regard for history came like a physical blow. There was no indignant protest, no one leapt to their feet in defense of The Boy Who Lived, and that sad fact only made it more honest – Severus had yet to be wrong about his students. "Are you sure, Severus?"

The potions master looked down his nose at the assembled staff and Order, not bothering to chose his words with care, "We have given that boy more liberty than fame deserves and we've no one to blame but ourselves. He and Malfoy have been doing something, his Occlumency is too advanced to see anything of use, but I'm certain he will be meeting with the Dark Lord within the month."

Though she could hardly put her face in her hands, Minerva wanted to do just that, possibly find a sandbox to bury her head as even the Headmaster expressed noises of disappointment and loss. Harry Potter was as much the center of things for the Order and the Light as Voldemort was for the Dark – a figurehead of hope, if even he had lost faith in them then the psychological war waging in the minds of witches and wizards everywhere was lost. There was a moment of silence, too long to pretend Harry's defection was of minimum importance, and nothing to be done. The Headmaster cleared his throat and Severus sat down in his severe way, "Thank you Severus, I'd like you to keep 24 hour surveillance on Mister Potter for the time being, report to me immediately if the situation changes. Minerva… anything to report from the Magical Creature Expeditions?"

"Er… Yes," There was shuffling of paper, an apparently vital ritual prior to making an announcement as she took the time to compose herself and business reasserted itself. "As you're well aware we have the support of the Merfolk and the local house elves. The Centaurs, Veelas, and Leprechauns have all elected to remain a neutral party if their civilizations aren't affected, and the Goblins have agreed to stand beside us if the need arises, but I'm afraid the envoys we've dispatched to the less… friendly societies were… failures." There was another one of those dry coughs from Lupin who looked honestly devastated as McGonagall paused to let that information sink in, 'failures' was a ridiculously polite way of saying they'd lost lives. And limbs, Auror Reece had apparated to the ministry missing his arms in an accident that was most definitely not a splinch, and the MediWitch Sanders was found torn to shreds on the northern shore of Crete. "The Vampires, Banshees, Trolls, Gnomes, Ogres, Harpies and… the Giants are against us."

"This is discouraging," said the Headmaster, a complete understatement, Minerva wanted to throttle him for the sheer audacity. Discouraging, and the biblical floods were but a drop of rain. The goblins and the merfolk, it was a sad state of affairs, perhaps if they could force the Death Eaters into the lake when the attack on Hogwarts came they would have a chance, it was just possible when Voldemort took Gringotts the Goblins wouldn't offer them service. No no, I'm sorry Mister Nott, I just cannot allow you into your vault today, yes I realize you have your key. They had their own magic, they had means of defending themselves, but against mobile forces with the ability to kill with a scream, mesmerize their prey, crush doors beneath their feet it seemed hopeless and the force against Voldemort could only pray for a miracle.

* * *

It was strange and disconcerting how trivial this all seemed. Living in a castle with 239 other students all clamoring for house points and Quidditch titles when the whole thing was so inconsequential – houses were so juvenile, such an adolescent habit to hold on to house rivalries so long after graduation and how absolutely imbecilic it was for Voldemort, for his father, for anyone to devote themselves so thoroughly to a dead man's ideals. And yet, here they were, so dwarfed by nature and circumstance that they themselves were inconsequential against its grandeur. Harry Potter sat with his back to the school, bare toes trailing in the mud of the lake shore and he looked so infinitesimal against the familiar body of water – so incredibly fallible it hurt Draco's eyes to see.

Three days since 'the argument about nothing' and they hadn't seen nor spoken to each other. He felt eyes boring through his neck in every Gryffindor class, and in turn stared across the great hall during meals where Harry never ate, but there hadn't actually been a word since Draco had called him pathetic, and it hurt. He spent an entire afternoon in the company of Pansy Parkinson, listening to her prattle on about how terrible it was for Professors Blirghty and Vector to assign essays due on the same day, and who was enamored of whom, and who was fucking who behind whose back. It had been the most excruciatingly boring conversation of his young life and he wondered that evening exactly how he'd spent five years in the company of such complete idiocy; so once again he sought out Harry Potter, who was a more scintillating conversationalist in his sleep.

"Following me?"

"Oh, just making sure you don't do anything ruthlessly Gryffindor."

Harry glowered up from under his fringe, voice heavily laden by sarcasm, "I highly doubt the lake shore poses a serious threat – perhaps the forces of evil have been brewing in little pustules of frog scum and waiting to take over the earth with a giant swarm of tadpoles that seek to slither into our beds. I'll try not to drown saving my own reflection."

"Cute Harry, very cute." Draco shifted a bit, the closest he ever came to squirming and fought the urge to pace, he didn't want to be fighting with Potter. It took so much more energy than it used to; mocking Potter for being an idiot was something that used to come so easily, hell mocking him now was second nature – but resenting him for misdirected concern was taking an effort that Draco couldn't afford, and didn't want to. "Look Potter… about what I said, I –"

"If you apologize I think I might have to hurt you."

"Would you mind terribly if I hurt you for not apologizing?" Draco got a snort in response and knew he'd been forgiven. It was a silly thing to hold a grudge over something so incredibly trivial when their ancient and heartfelt rivalry had been apparently put on the back burner to simmer under conversations and demeaning pranks, insults, and death threats had been quite forgotten. "Look… my point was… I didn't actually have a point."

Harry shrugged patted the ground beside him, "Doesn't surprise me, have a seat then."

Malfoy didn't sit, he started pacing, shoes occasionally squelching in the mud as he got too near the lake bed, Harry wiggled his toes and let the mud come up between them and the frogspawn seep out over his feet. He needed to be doing something because Harry was too calm. He desperately wanted to be doing something important and something distracting that would take his mind off the overwhelming urge to scream that had been boiling up out of his gut for days. Draco wanted to scream, to run, to yell, to cry, to do something, anything, that wasn't this – because this was slow, and painful, and terrifying. There were just so many things, things to do, things not to do, and it hurt – the stagnant scream hurt. It was energy, passion, anticipation and fear all wound up into one powerful verb and ready to explode out of his chest and take his life with it. "Harry I'm afraid."

Harry didn't ask him what he was afraid of. It was, in Draco's mind, one of his few redeeming features and he seemed to take the statement in stride as Draco's pacing came to a halt. Harry nodded slowly and said "Okay," absolutely still because he apparently hadn't seen the use in the fidgeting and pacing that Draco had fallen prey to, and hadn't reacted at all. Draco forgave him for this because blurting something stupid and unprecedented was not a simple thing to react to.

"It's not okay. It's…" It wasn't okay because he'd signed up for this, because he'd demanded help, and argued, and pushed his way through when he had an out, and it wasn't 'okay' because he couldn't be afraid of anything, and couldn't afford to feel anything but the absolute conviction that he was doing the wrong thing for the right reasons and that he had nothing to fear from death. Needlessly rationalizing to himself until he blurted something completely irrelevant to the conversation at hand, and Harry blessed stupid Harry with his never ending altruism tried to understand. "I'm not afraid to die. Wizards and Witches don't have things like Heaven and Hell, we don't have… arbitrary rules that dictate the afterlife, we have our own religion, we choose our own paths, there is no divine retribution from a higher power. It's just… I don't want to."

"I don't want to either." Draco resumed his pacing and looked away, frustrated, overcome, furious with himself, and a thousand different variations on human idiocy; wishing he'd learn to keep his mouth shut around Potter and wondering what the point of learning that would be. Nine days. They had nine days before everything was ready, nine days before they would be porting away from Hogwarts and into the Dark Lord's palm. Nine days until Draco found a reason to test his faith. "No one in their right mind does."

"You are not in your right mind, Potter." Draco shot back without missing a beat, turning on his right heel, sliding half an inch sideways through the muck, left foot, right foot, maybe if his heart beat fast enough, or if he ran hard enough he could shake the feeling that was sitting in his diaphragm and making it difficult to breathe. The nausea and twisted ball of nerves that sat at his very core. "Just forget about it."

Harry conceded the point, "Sit down Malfoy, you'll feel better." Draco seriously doubted anything short of a miracle would make him feel better at this juncture, but he sat down anyway because it really could be no worse than pacing. The nervous tension that was holding him aloft slid away, he could almost feel it leaking out of his bones and muscles until he was sagging like a sack of potatoes against Harry's shoulder and wondering when he would start to drool. Draco was exhausted, so tired of being worried, and of working miles for every step they took – and maybe there was something to this sitting down idea of Potter's because surely he had never had the energy to stand.

He tried to console himself on a somewhat regular basis, laughing when he joked about not having to take his NEWTs at least, and it seemed to work until the laughter turned hard and there was an edge of hysteria and he found himself crying instead. His father's voice in his head, "Malfoy's do not cry," excepting the one instance when he was seven and their favorite cruppy fell into the venomous tentacula and Narcissa sobbed at its makeshift funeral. Draco would see his mother again, at least, his soul would be entombed in the gossamer room and his body buried next to his mother's in an ash casket – the same wood as his wand – but he would never see Harry again, never eat a chocolate frog again, never terrorize the first years again and it was not worth it to think he would lose all of these things to avoid taking his NEWTs, or to kill the Dark Lord.

When he was small and the subject of death quite foreign, when the cruppy died he did not understand why his mother was crying, Draco hadn't been afraid. Wizards lived an average of one hundred and seventy years and to a seven year old cradling a dead dog one hundred years was a long time. At seven, every year is an eternity and you're wondering how people don't get bored by the time they're thirty, but even at seven the idea of the world ending in nine days was daunting. Draco wasn't seven any longer and every one of his remaining hundred-or-so years looked like paradise compared to what he anticipated. Nine days, as though giving it an exact number made it easier to swallow. Nine days, Wednesday morning, midnight, and in the unlikely event that they walked back to Hogwarts unscathed, everything would be different. Draco would have to move on with his life, adopt a life, adopt a new purpose, find something to break up the monotony of days that could very well be endless. He would be forced to adapt to a world completely without political agenda and full of sparkling insipid hope. Live in a world completely full of chocolate frogs, and Quidditch matches, and comfortable socks, and the things that made life worth it.

Maybe it would be better to die except for that scream. The knotted verb in his chest, the explosion paused at inception, making thought so much harder and death that much more terrifying. Cyclical thought. He didn't _want _to die, he didn't want to squash the rest of his life into nine days, he didn't want to leave magic behind, he didn't want to leave life, or the lake, or the castle, or the entire grand and unexplored world unexplored for anything, he wasn't ready to die. Maybe in one hundred years, maybe when he'd seen and done everything; he didn't even have his apparition license yet and it seemed sick and trivial to think it. Mounting fear and apprehension, growing pressure until the urge to leap to his feet again and run screaming into the forest was almost overwhelming. "I'm scared Harry." And there was a long moment of silence.

"Hey Malfoy," Said Harry, "First thing I'm gonna do when I get back is jump in the lake. How about you?" They were waiting, they would always be waiting, it was the thing to do, it seemed. Wait. Wait for something to fall out of the sky, wait for the world to stop spinning, wait for the thirteenth day and the twenty-fifth hour when things reached resolution, and wait for resolution to end. This was day five, there were eight left before Harry left to meet his maker, or at least to meet Voldemort, who in some strange and metaphorical way was very much his maker. Harry had taken to running. It was something, at least, to take his mind away from what was lurking just around the corner, something absolutely physical that did not require thought, just breathe in, breathe out, feel your feet pounding and your heart beating their counter rhythm. He had stopped running because the jog back was never worth it, and now he needed something to replace it. So he sat out here by the lake, and Draco had only wanted to find him in the peripheral sense of not-at-all – it was how they coped with apology.

Draco blinked and the cotton in his brain gave way to wry humor when Harry's elbow met his ribs; he said it with such absurd conviction and determination that Draco laughed in spite of himself. Draco couldn't guess what Harry was thinking, if taking a swim in the lake was his childhood dream, or if Harry was quietly imagining some future while Malfoy was having an attack of survival instincts beside him. Or maybe, in conjuncture, he was thinking the same things, in circles about things that weren't going to happen and wishing they would – silently awarding Harry the non-sequitur award of the week, Draco played along because there was nothing else to do. "It's May, the lake will be cold."

"It's always cold." A flash of a smile, ignoring the obvious, "at least the frog scum won't be a problem."

"Oh ha ha Potter, so funny I could die laughing I'm sure." Sarcastic, because amiable or not, mocking Harry was the easiest thing in the world; but Draco found himself relaxing. Feeling, if not better, then grateful for the peace that hopelessness brought – there was nothing he could do, nothing Harry could do, and dwelling only made things that much worse. "In which case, I'm going to climb the whomping willow."

"That's the ticket, I'll have a medi-witch standing by to peel your ego off the floor." There was something about this happy conversation, it was happy. Draco was forgetting, pointedly, about the potion he had burbling in one of the lower dungeons, something that he hadn't thought about until the last minute and so was working non-stop to come up with the antidote. The dark lord would make Harry test any gift, of course, and the moment Draco realized it he sat up in bed and ran to the potions room in a panic because he hadn't thought of it before, and he was too fond of Harry to lose him to something like their own weapon. It was going to happen anyway, he knew, but if Harry died it would be at Voldemort's hands, not his. He didn't think about it, just let the burbling potion take a back seat to a cartoonish image of being peeled off the ground with a giant spatula. Survival simply didn't matter anymore – the mud did.

"Speaking of my Ego, Parkinson suspects I've been… off because of my fiancée." Draco snorted and pushed the tips of his shoes into the mud with a green 'squelch', "as though breaking off an engagement with some silly bint overseas is some tragedy."

"You were engaged?" Harry shot him an incredulous look and helped with the destruction of Draco's shoes by leaving a muddy foot print all over the top of his right one, "Why did the poor girl agree to something like that?"

Malfoy retaliated by sending a wave of near-liquid mud over Harry's ankles, "It was a family arrangement." Harry slapped his feet down and mud spattered both of their shins, "I called it off over break, father has done enough damage, I was doing what I could to save the Malfoy reputation. Besides, she was a hag - Pansy says I've been morose."

"You have been morose," Harry said with no intention, and wiggled his toes around in the mud, chuckling. "I blame the dolorous charms – Flitwick's mad to teach us those."

"It was Vector's stupid pop quiz that almost did me in. What sort of man surprises his students awake with Filibusters then makes them take an exam?"

"The kind that works here. At least you don't have Blirghty always asking after your health, if I so much as sneeze, he thinks my scar is going to explode into strawberry pie."

"Hah, I hate strawberry pie, you'd think you could make an effort to make it cherry – I'm in that class." Draco snorted and looked down at his feet with an expression of disgust, "Potter, you've ruined my socks."

"Should've taken your shoes off then."

"I am not going to dignify that with a response." Harry laughed at him for that and deliberately smeared mud on his pant leg, so Draco returned the favor. "It's getting late."

"Dinner then, or are mud pies all right with your grace?"

"When was the last time _you_ ate something other than worms Potter?"

Harry shrugged, "Probably the last time you reminded me."

"Mordred Potter, you –"

"Yeah yeah, I know, I'm a toddler, I can't take care of myself, you shouldn't have to remind me to do stupid things like eat my dinner and wash my hair." Harry laughed and pushed himself to his feet, sinking ankle deep in the muddy ground and he held out a hand to Draco who did the same and said 'eugh.' "Come on then Mother, let's go inside."

Looking up at the castle, Draco was once again reminded of their general insignificance, laugh or cry, and Harry's impatient and muddy tug on his wrist made him smile – it just wasn't important anymore.

* * *

…in spite of myself I like that last section. It would be nice if I just let them be teenagers, but no, I was a gloomy sixteen year old doofus, and so too shall they be.

My apologies for... the incredible lateness of this post - I don't deserve them, but review. Please oh please. Sorry... I'm wincing, really.


	31. Chasing the Pineapple

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Harry Potter (novels, industry, products, movies, person, etc.) that honor belongs to Scholastic Books and JKRowling. No really, I know I know, it would make perfect sense if I did, since I'm a millionaire and all… and such an innocent cheery writer as we all know… Heh. Yeah, you get the idea.

**Author's Notes: **Right – I've just decided to start posting this as fast as I can, or rather, as often as I feel like it without bothering to wait for people to fuel my ego – this is something of a miracle, take it or leave it. This is a transition chapter, not much happens with it, but I really love the anticipation with the aurors, and the explanation of the auror versus hit-wizard status… Love the Aurors. This really is the beginning of the end, sweet huh? Though, and I'm happy to let you in on this little secret, you don't necessarily have to hang around to catch the rest of the story – the entire thing is posted on Malf0yM0nkeys (my lj page) which is now listed as my 'homepage' on and is therefore easier then ever to access. Go forth – read, prosper. And as always, thanks for dropping by.

**Special Thanks to: **

**Jillian: **Why thank you. I dunno if it's reflective of real life or not - I know that if I knew (absolutely positively knew) that somebody was out for my blood I'd probably want to sit around and mope about it all day too. And I'm glad you get that it's brittle, I think sometimes I'm pounding the point so much it's about to break, and I'm really glad you like that. Though, to be perfectly honest, this story was supposed to be entirely different, it was going to end in a great and bloody battle between the forces of light and darkness, people were going to be picking over body parts and magical paraphenelia for weeks, and I think I was going to call it something like "Wind Riders" ...Hah. Anyway, thanks very much for reading, and here's hoping we'll see you at the end of chapter 31.

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Chapter 31 - Chasing the Pineapple

Breakfast was nothing if not the most important meal of the day if for no other purpose than the toast. But when the toast was dry and the eggs somewhat soggy, the students still sat patiently in wait of the morning post. Harry, at the insistence of Hermione, had renewed his subscription to the Daily Prophet sometime in January on the basis that the information they printed could do no worse than knowing nothing at all. Often times he wondered about the veracity of that statement, generally when sorting through wartime propaganda for valid news which was in short supply.

Still the paper made him laugh. Oh how singers change their tune when under new management. The Prophet's style of reporting had been significantly altered, though not to the immeasurable standards of his former best friend. Though Rita Skeeter's year had been up and she had been released from her contract with Hermione, her employer had forbidden her from posting trash and allowing their 'esteemed establishment' to become a tawdry tabloid once again. The boy who lived was exonerated daily in the press, labeled again and again as the savior of the wizarding world under the competent tutelage of Albus Dumbledore, Merlin First Class, head Mugwump of the Wizengamot etcetera etcetera. It was all a lot of tripe, they all knew, but people needed something to look forward to. Desperate housewives like Molly Weasley needed the reassurance that their children would not die without a cause and protector – Harry was the Santa Clause for adults, nothing so grandiose as a deity but important as a figurehead nonetheless. Posting negative things about Santa would be tantamount to cultural treason.

The April, 30th edition had just arrived, landing in various breakfast foods across the Great Hall, and in Neville's unfortunate case, in his orange juice. Harry grinned in spite of himself while Neville unfolded the soggy paper and shook orange pulp off the front page. Today's 'news' consisted largely of the many successes Minister Fudge had in subduing Death Eater factions across Britain, apparently, barring a small mishap in Worcester where three valiant aurors happened to lose their lives, all was right in the world. Not for the first time Harry wondered how Fudge kept his job, surely he was hanging on by the skin of his teeth, only a man of the ministry in name because 'war time was no time to elect a new minister'.

With a sigh Harry turned away from his paper to find a small tawny owl sitting patiently by his untouched muesli with a letter in its beak. It was no one's that he recognized, but that was hardly a surprise, at least once a week since his sixteenth birthday Harry had been receiving mail from witches and wizards across the UK, simply thanking him for existing. Without opening the note he could easily determine the gist of the message, the envelope was a pale pink with gilt weighing down the edges. "Dear Mister Potter, I realize you can't possibly know me, but my name is Doris Langley. I just wanted to let you know that your courage has been a constant inspiration blah blah blah, and no matter what happens I'm confident that you will prevail because you are the epitome of all things good, blah blah blah, please marry me at your soonest convenience."

Harry groaned and fed the owl a piece of toast off the sideboard. None of his classmates would be silly enough to send something of this nature – it was more than likely the wishful thinking of a forty-three year old spinster with too many cats. It never occurred to him to be angry about these things, never really occurred to him to resent the aging spinster – there were so many other things to be furious at, so many things to resent the universe for that being upset with the unfortunate Doris Langley never registered.

He read once, that there are five stages to grief: anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Having thoroughly explored the stages of anger and denial, bypassing bargaining, he found himself firmly in the category of depression. Sad that so many people were dying all around him and because of him, he was miserable at the thought and it was so much worse than denial of the fact that it was his fault.

In an unprecedented effort to be noble he had offered a very unfortunate young man to share the Hogwarts championship and TriWizard fame. Some silly girl he'd had a passing infatuation with died and rotted in her own home on his behalf, some equally silly boy killed himself because of that death. The guilt went on, his own godfather had saved him from himself, his best friend had died in his favorite candy store because Voldemort had been unable to find _him, _Hagrid had been forced on a mission that everyone knew was futile because Harry hadn't made the effort, hadn't won the war sooner. Some silly twat quietly blamed and resented him for the suicide of his mother as though Harry's actions had forced her hand, and Harry forced himself to live with all of it.

He wondered, sometimes in the middle of the night when sleep eluded him, exactly what Voldemort had in mind. Would he force Harry to prove his loyalty, drag some unfortunate muggle before him to die, would he be forced to re-live the most horrible moments of his life with a smile on his face? Wouldn't it be fitting if Voldemort prepared him his own speech, "Yes I'm glad they died, they were useless blood traitors not worthy of licking our boots." His best friends, his only family.

Depression seemed a comfortable mode given the circumstances, something he could let go of only away from constant reminders of his failures. Three more people died today in the Daily Prophet, and it was his fault.

* * *

Level Two of the Ministry of Magic was teeming with activity as Aurors and Hitwizards scrambled over mountains of paperwork and the occasional irate prisoner spat vulgarities as they were dragged down eight flights of stairs to the courtrooms. The hitwizards had finally managed to apprehend the bastard that kept putting absurdity hexes on the local religious buildings so there were no more sudden and unexplained chronic bouts of sneezing purple bubbles throughout the UK. It was a small and silly thing, but the less resources that were being spread around fixing cauldrons and reassuring old muggle women that no, flying saucers do not in fact exist, and no the government is not insect-ing your house, the more resources they had for the important things. Like making sure no more muggles were trussed up by their underwear or left tied to the fake tree in the London Zoo to be mauled by the lions.

There were only 150 Aurors in total, a small number for any police force and only a fraction of the Ministry Law Enforcement. Ten teams of fourteen Aurors, each team with a respective commander and all headed by one man. The system worked. In March, when they lost Barnes to the Death Eaters and the G division needed a team leader, rather than breaking apart the teams, a new group leader was appointed from amongst the A division and the best field auror from divisions B through J was sent to take his place until another young hopeful completed his training and bolstered the ranks back to 150.

The system was somewhat flawed and the influx of paperwork was astounding with every new transfer, but it worked. There was a sense of camaraderie between the aurors that the hitwizards didn't share; it's impossible to stay aloof of the people you spend 16 hours a day with, the people you live, breathe, and die with. The Aurors had a strict sense of loyalty to one another, and friendly rivalries were struck between the divisions, keeping everyone on their toes. It worked. Which was how A division special field operative Nymphadora Tonks found herself staring down Rufus Scrimegour at the head of G division.

"All right people! This is it!" Shacklebolt, Murther, Dawlish, Lockheed, Savage, Heatley, Tonks, and Johnson stood leaning in various states of repose against the walls and chair backs of the briefing room, all saving Proudfoot who stood strictly at attention. There was no disrespect in their respective poses, simply a comfortable confidence that the man before them was well aware of their capabilities and had a severe dislike of posturing – Proudfoot was a berk. "We've been seeing plenty of Death Eater activity and our Invisibles have confirmed the presence of the Dark Lord himself."

Kingsley Shacklebolt pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, Terrence Lockheed blanched the color of sour milk, the tension in the room rose so high you could taste it, bitter and tangy as bile rose and nerves caused the occasional tremor to run across their fingers. "You're sure Boss?" came the question from Proudfoot, like an eager puppy who was so desperate for recognition you could almost see his tail wagging. "I mean, weren't we sure last time?" Tonks squirmed, Murther shuffled his foot and tried to look away, it had been his reconnaissance.

"We're positive." Scrimegour snapped, "We have a confirmed location from an informant on the inside and the invisibles confirmed – they had Basken with them." Basken and her infamous invisibles, the most capable spies in the business, any auror or hitwizard in training that showed an aptitude for observation and disguise was recommended to them for specialized training in espionage and deception. The invisibles made the best spies and the worst spouses, because of her metamorphagi abilities Tonks had been considered for the position until her natural and catastrophic clumsiness had shown itself and she was booted back to 'auror camp.' "I want all of your men on this people, F division pull your team out of Birmingham, we move out in 36 hours people. Report back here at 18:00 tomorrow. Dismissed."

Tonks felt a lurch somewhere in the region of her stomach and sat down rather abruptly on the staff table. When she was younger she had shown an aptitude for Defense, probably a genetic throwback to the dark arts practitioners in her family, two years ago Albus Dumbledore offered her a position as DADA teacher at Hogwarts but she loved her job and wouldn't sacrifice it for the world. Now she wondered if she shouldn't have been a teacher, a nice, safe, simple teacher that taught her students all sorts of useful tricks for defending against hexes and escaping swamp dwellers. A nice boring teacher with a life expectancy five times that of the average auror, at 34 she had already exceeded that statistic by a year and it seemed her run of luck was at an end. She had twenty four hours to get her life in order it seemed, and though her will was up to date and her father knew the risks she took and Delilah Turney would take the cat if she was out on assignment it still wasn't enough time. She and her men would be back at the Ministry in 30 hours having said goodbye to their families again because every mission was dangerous but Voldemort was suicide.

There was horrible fluttering in her gut, a never ending flap and bluster of three thousand butterflies, impossibly crammed into stomach and causing her limbs to shake pathetically. It would be a miracle if she survived, a miracle if she could hold her wand when it came. 30 hours to make herself a small dinner, to feed her cat, to visit her father, to twist and turn in her sheets until she was back. 30 hours for her division to do the same, and she was responsible for all of them. "So Heatley, urm... Sarah, I was wondering if you'd like to get a drink with me?" She heard Dawlish's hesitant tenor from underwater, and Heatley's wavering reply "I'm sorry, I think I have to visit my mother."

* * *

"Madam Pomfrey said it would be harder on her because she's so small." Harry had been standing in the hospital wing for a full ten minutes before Hermione acknowledged him from her position beside Marjorie's bed. The girl was in a light doze between contractions, exhausted after so much time in pain and a hospital bed, peaceful as Hermione held her hand gently, offering all the support of the past seven months and more. Harry didn't really want to be jealous, and he didn't pull up a chair.

"She'll be all right." She would be of course, after this everyone would be, Marjorie and Hermione, and the remaining Weasleys and everyone he'd come to know and love. Seamus wouldn't send him strange glances across the room in the mornings and Dean wouldn't surreptitiously stare at him across the dinner table. "Madam Pomfrey's the best."

"I know that." Hermione still hadn't glanced at him, hadn't looked in his direction, and Harry knew she wouldn't. Of course Hermione knew, she knew everything, brightest witch of her year and possibly the only Hogwarts student more dedicated to the library than anything – and he knew that wasn't fair but he couldn't help himself. "But she's scared, and I don't want her to be afraid."

"I can imagine." Harry said, and left it at that because he really didn't want to explain why he felt anything, or why he didn't want Hermione to be afraid of him, or why he couldn't stand the thought of Malfoy being terrified on his behalf. Maybe he should have been more subtle, maybe he should have let his best friend know that he was never really gone and no matter what people were saying his head was in the right place, or maybe he really was joining Voldemort and none of it mattered but for the seething acid in his stomach and the flare of white fury when the name was invoked. Harry was fairly certain he'd lost his mind and only ruthless Occlumency was keeping Voldemort's laughter out of his head. "It'll be over soon."

Hermione lost her patience. It had been running thin, like a tiny cooling thread of water in a tall glass of whiskey, but she finally lost it with that quiet statement, and Harry couldn't say he hadn't been expecting it. He hadn't been the best friend that he could have, he certainly hadn't made much of an effort to understand her point of view, and even now didn't feel bothered by her looming outburst as she turned around to glare at him, bushy hair and glinting eyes somehow humorous and threatening. It was the same expression he saw every time she looked at him since February when she looked at all. "Why are you here, Harry?"

"Because…" Because tomorrow I'm going to die and I wanted you to know it's not your fault, because you were my friend for a very long time and you deserve an explanation, because you're the most convenient person I could think of to try this with, because my last will and testament is under my bed should you need to look. There were about twenty thousand reasons 'because' and none of them seemed terribly appropriate, would it be too much to tell her the whole story, too little to say 'because I wanted to see you,' too disgustingly clichéd to say 'because I've missed you?' Probably. There was no way to leap into this conversation and maybe he should have been speaking to Luna Lovegood who would yammer on about Shebilans and didn't need the details. "Because I thought you could use the company?"

"That is dragon dung and you know it Harry. You wouldn't be talking to me if you didn't want something." Which was true, and still stung. Hermione's opinion of him had sunk rather far, and he hated himself for recognizing it as a good thing. The more hostile his classmates were the more believable his claim that he was joining the Death Eaters, glimpses of Hermione's glare, the whispers and suspicious muttering that dogged his steps through the halls and the disappointed stares of his professors would go a long way towards convincing any legilimens that he was genuine. "Afraid you're going to fail your exams?"

No, he wasn't, and not for the obvious reasons. The endless research had given him better studying habits, accurate note taking on what he deemed relevant to the cause had allowed him to see what was important amongst the drivel, his strident efforts in Occlumency had reinforced his focus and stubbornness. In a painful attempt at normalcy amongst the idiocy that seemed to define his life Harry did his homework, he paid attention in his classes so the teachers could not fault him, could not take time away from him in detention. The answers had been found but the simple habit of being a good student that Harry had managed to cultivate had somehow stuck and he found himself prepared in advance for the exams he probably wasn't going to take. The thought made him smile wryly, Ron would have been floored, and if Ron had been there it wouldn't have happened. "No, really Hermione, I just wanted to…"

And he never finished his sentence because Marjorie chose that moment to shift and groan, pushing herself up on her pillows around a grimace. "I'm sorry… oh hello Harry. I must have drifted off for a minute there…" she started, and her teeth clenched and her knuckles tightened around Hermione's hand as she rode out another contraction and slumped back against the headboard. "Oh Raistlin, Hermione. Could I have some ice?"

"Of course sweet heart." She said, and moved towards the ice chips that Madam Pomfrey had thoughtfully provided. Harry got in the way of course, as awkward as he ever was when people were trying to get things done. Sirius told him once last Christmas that his father had been the same way, and that his mother frequently kicked the man out of the kitchen because he was a useless lump and god forbid he go near the stove. So Harry scooted out of the way only to run into Madam Pomfrey as she came out of her office to check on her patient, and was jostled back into Hermione's round elbows. After several mumbled apologies and a few consumed ice chips Hermione gave him her attention once more. "Look Harry, can't this wait?"

"Um… sure." He said softly and surprised himself by leaning over to give Hermione a swift peck on the cheek. He told himself that it didn't really matter, and that he would only confuse her if he said anything now, and that he was being silly and there was a chance, albeit slim, that he would be fine. Hermione gaped like a landed fish as he made his way out of the hospital wing, "It's not important. I'll tell you later."

* * *

Wow - sometimes even I get tired of Harry's constant moping - I think if I were his friend I would've head butted him by now. Good thing he's not real. Or ... Gasp? Did I just speak blasphemy? 


	32. Tuesday Night Part 1

**Disclaimer: **I don't own Harry Potter (novels, industry, products, movies, person, etc.) that honor belongs to Scholastic Books and JKRowling. If I did you can rest assured that Ginny Weasley never would have awoken Harry's 'inner beast' nor for that matter would I have used the inner beast metaphor because really… no.

**Author's Notes: **Before I get to the juice of this note, I'd pretty much like to say "I apologize for the science in these last chapters" it's not accurate, I'm not even sure if it makes sense. By the time I got to this part of the story I was so flippin' ready to be done with it that I sort of copped out – hopefully no one minds too much. Right – onto the good stuff. So you know how I've been dropping all sorts of notes about porn happening in the future? This would be the chapter where that takes place. Not here, obviously, I'm not a complete twit and I understand that will suspend/eliminate my account if I post that here. So I haven't, the chapter posted here is at best R, comparable to films like Latter Days, you know what's happening, and I'm not shying around the subject, but there's nothing explicit. **IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN THE RAUNCHY BITS **– the entire thing is posted on Malf0yM0nkeys (my lj page) which is now listed as my 'homepage' on and is therefore easier then ever to access. Go forth – read, prosper. And as always, thanks for dropping by.

**Special thanks to: **

**Jillian: **I'm so glad you don't like Harry. Well, okay, maybe you do like Harry but you're right, he _is _far from perfect and I'm so glad you appreciate it because there's been more than one occasion where I've wanted to smack the little shit and I'm not even his mum. Of course, I've felt that way about Ron, Hermione, Draco, and myself at one point or another, I think it's all part of being 16. Glad you're still liking it, and here's hoping (even after this chapter… I've been told it's awkward) you continue to do so. Thanks.

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Chapter 32 – Tuesday Night, part 1

Harry's hands were shaking slightly as he put the stopper back over the smoking flask. The knick in his ankle had all but healed with barely a scar for his trouble; all Draco could see from his vantage point was a thin pink line that he wanted to magnify and then erase. "What are we doing?" the exasperation and fear in his voice surprised even him. He had painstakingly brewed this all-powerful antidote – a beozar in lasting liquid, hunched over his little cauldron as the aquamarine sparks of murtlap essence jumped up his nose and purple smog turned his hair a dull grey. Harry lowered the glass from his lips and glared, it was green, how stereotypical, how very like a fairy tale before the prince arrived. He couldn't help but repeat himself – "What the hell are we doing?"

"Well, I'm going to drink this potion that I hope you brewed correctly because I heard blood poisoning is a nasty business, and you are going to stop asking inane questions. That's what we're doing." Harry knocked back the contents of the beaker in juvenile defiance, made a face, and sat down quicker than he intended. Malfoy grabbed his elbow and directed him to one of the dusty chairs in their disused lab before he fell over.

"That is not what I meant Potter."

"Yes I know." Harry was insufferable like this, calm and absolutely unlike himself in every regard. The urge to crease his eyebrows and beat Potter to death with his favorite broom was almost overwhelming and a panicky little seed of fear lodged in his chest until all he wanted to do was run away to Bermuda with Harry firmly in tow. He'd heard that Merlin himself quite enjoyed Bermuda. "What Malfoy, having second thoughts?"

"No you dolt. I'm having third, fourth, and fifth thoughts. Do you really think this is going to work? How can anybody be so goddamned gullible? It's a trap and you know it." Not for the first time Draco wondered how he'd gotten suckered into this. Ask golden-boy for a favor in keeping you alive and find yourself on the road to suicide via heroism and the Dark Lord. It was the ultimate statement in irony really, and Potter had gotten so good at those, people mistaking his hermetic tendencies for evil: Draco's best friend and only Merlin knew why.

Bold as brass they were going to walk up to Voldemort, offer him a pittance against five years of irritation, and pray to god on high that it worked because there was no alternative. He'd heard the whole sad story, several times in fact, and drawing a wand against Voldemort would not be an option – Draco would marvel if Harry's wand wasn't simply 'removed for security reasons' during this diplomatic farce. The thought nauseated him and they both knew it was never going to work, that Voldemort was simply seeking an easy audience without the potential interference of Dumbledore's army – Draco's not-exactly-unsuccessful attempts at Legelimency had revealed Harry's potent and genuine distaste for the headmaster and it only made things more convincing. "So what do you propose we do instead?"

"Call it off!" Draco hadn't realized he still held Harry's elbow until he let go and his hand seemed unusually cold. It was more of the same. Their lives had been working in the typical ass backwards fashion, and suddenly what they were working for seemed impossible, not worth it. It had been an impulsive statement, but like the urge to fly to Bermuda it was growing in appeal – away from the Dark Lord, away, away, because nothing was worth killing Harry.

"Not after I drank that stuff…" Harry made another face at the brew that was now gently etching lines in his emptied glass and smiled, so thrilled to be doing something at last. It was that same excitement he always felt in late July, like the next morning would bring salvation and a miracle, and he was filled with giddy anticipation until the clock struck midnight and it actually did. Surely this was as much for Hagrid as anyone else.

"Potter, I'm serious." A scowl, Malfoys took themselves far too seriously and Draco was no exception to the rule – mockery in the face of his concern was unacceptable.

"So am I! That stuff was nasty…" The grin slowly slid off Harry's face and into a moue of frustration because Draco didn't understand that he was guilty until proven innocent and dying this way would prove that he wasn't a death eater, and that he cared though often he didn't. Running away not an option, it amounted to the betrayal of everything and everyone who would be meeting him in hell. "Look, it's not like we can reschedule for Thursday because you'll be a traitor and we'll spend the rest of our lives running from it – or, or maybe we could try it, and so what if we die because it'll be just us and it will matter."

"It won't. It won't matter, and we won't be the only ones affected in this." Sometime in the course of 'you and I' and 'Potter' and 'Malfoy' respectively they had become a 'they' and a 'we' but the frustration outweighed any satisfaction Draco might have gleaned from the realization. Harry was his, if only in his head because the notion was ridiculous and painful – in his own special way there was the affection that made him patient enough to glare and attached enough to make the self-made-martyr worth convincing, damn his eyes. "Two hundred years from now do you really want to be known as the Boy Who Lived to Turn Traitor and Die Because He was Bloody Stupid?"

"If Binns is still teaching, people won't know at all." Harry squirmed and slouched uncomfortably under Malfoy's stare and he had to admit it was tempting. Go running to Dumbledore and confess everything, beg for help and forgiveness, 'please sir, save us.' Harry vaguely wondered if vindictive potions masters in times gone by had hand picked the chairs in this classroom to be as uniformly awkward in an expression of student-directed malice as the potion fizzed through his blood and thoughts flickered and popped through his brain like a wet electrical circuit, leaving spots on the edges of his consciousness. "Besides – I'll be dead."

Draco changed tactics. He couldn't help but feel that Harry didn't understand what he was up against. He was the boy who lived, he had faced Voldemort and miraculously survived five times – he was Harry and therefore gullible and in need of educating. He wasn't Voldemort's, couldn't be Voldemort's and the urge to 'call an adult' when things got confusing was almost overwhelming. What had they been thinking, poisoning him, it was astoundingly pathetic and ninety-eight percent futile, like bailing out the Titanic with a teaspoon. "What about the people that are counting on you? What happens when they die too?"

Harry flushed and scowled darkly, when, not if. Malfoy had given him no chance for survival, no opportunity to succeed even in hypothesis and it rankled because it was inevitable – even if he lived. "They'll find another Harry Potter and give him a stupid scar." Dumbledore probably had thirty young prospects that fulfilled a prophecy in some right, Neville Longbottom and the broken tea cup would not make for a fascinating story, but there was something tragic and inspiring in the faces of Frank and Alice, and heroes were easily replaced. Harry would be supplanted by the next 'new hope' and someone would step in to fill the blank, and everyone that died to put him there would merely be a footnote.

"Think about it Potter, this is stupid." Harry was right, Draco knew he was fighting a losing battle, and he hardly knew why he was trying anymore. Harry was determined, stupid, reckless, and possibly suicidal – but he was right, they had come too far not to try. Still he was sick to think about it and the prospect of running away had its own merits completely outside of survival, but think about it he did because Harry was prepared, the plan was as sound as it could be, and it merited the respect of thought. Still, the state of constant tension and the need to vomit on someone's shoes was not improving his temper. He now knew why normally intelligent people like Sirius Black came running to the rescue, and it had been bothering him that he was willing to do the same – Harry was _his _dammit and Voldemort couldn't have him without a fight. "You are going to die!"

"I was always going to die, Draco, but this way I'll die trying – besides, I don't exactly have a lot to live for."

"Stop. Just stop." Draco had had enough. Whatever barriers and justifications he had built against this moment broke at that quiet statement and he let himself lean forward like he hadn't in five weeks in spite of Harry's magnetic touch, and he let himself reach for Harry's hair, snaky and so black Draco thought his fingers would come away stained and almost hoped that they would as he buried his hands in it. The lack of inhibitions let him draw him forward and push his lips against Potter's scowl and smooth away the fine lines that had drawn the corner of his mouth. Slid closer over the uncomfortable chair, wrapped himself around a neck, and torso, and sigh that slid closer to him and Draco wanted nothing less than to hold the pieces together. "You are going to shut up and let me worry about you."

Harry knew that was a bad idea, it would always be a bad idea because the worrying would be futile and he would feel nothing but guilt for all the people that had worried for him unnecessarily and burdened him with their hope. He didn't want Malfoy to worry about him, or care, or have any emotional stake in this whatsoever, but it was too late and had been too late the moment Harry had solicited his help. Harry regretted nothing more than his decision to involve Malfoy, because Malfoy would die and he shouldn't: he had been reminded again and again that it wasn't Harry who was responsible for Draco's involvement, and Harry hadn't put the dark mark on his arm or given him to Lucius Malfoy at childbirth. Harry wasn't responsible for Draco at all except for being there and in need of his expertise when he should have walked away. But he hadn't walked away, and being here now, in spite of everything, was probably the best feeling he'd ever had. "Yeah alright." He said softly and Malfoy finally kissed him.

In perfect silence and with gentle touches Harry fell away from the chair, falling inexorably towards Malfoy's mouth and his skin, and the blue sparkles that marked the passage of his fingers across Harry's neck, and through his hair, and down his back. The simple contact of his ankle against Harry's, their hips and shoulders touching lightly had him wanting to lean into the touch and press himself against the other boy or recoil because Draco had made it clear to him that his advances were unwanted in the past. Harry hadn't wasted time asking himself why or what or how, or if he was or wasn't, and he didn't waste time agonizing because Malfoy had kissed him the first time, or he had kissed Malfoy the second, and he didn't worry that the couch in Gryffindor would never be the same. He thought 'why not' and kissed back in a long and drawn out series of fascinating and apparently natural touches until Malfoy had run away and Harry tried not to waste time wondering why because it mattered, but shortly it wouldn't, and shortly had become tomorrow.

Malfoy slid closer and closer until they were tangled together on the floor and Draco was mapping his collar bone with the softest, driest lips Harry could imagine, and Harry tried to think the honorable thing, tried to push Malfoy away because he couldn't know what Malfoy was thinking, and didn't want to think that he was only touching and allowing this touch because there would be no tomorrow. Harry, however, was not honorable and decided he didn't give a damn what Malfoy was thinking because Harry was thinking it too and it was only reasonable.

Draco moved slowly, carefully covering Harry's skin with his lips, tracing the lines of his muscles and ribs as every new inch was revealed to him, lifting Harry's shirt over his head, progressing with a fine line of kisses up his abdomen until Draco reached his mouth. He wasn't rough, or abrupt, or kind with his handling of Harry, he was efficient, he was gentle, he was thorough, mapping everything he came into contact with. People had used Harry as a pawn, as a symbol, and as a martyr. Voldemort was using him to discourage the enemy, Dumbledore was using him to inspire hope in his soldiers, 'a fifteen year old boy could stand up to him so can we,' and they blended together into a manipulative blob of a human being until Draco could hardly distinguish one from the other. But no one would know Harry like this, no one would see him as Harry and a rival, disposed, no one could ever command his full attention like this.

Draco didn't ask the question 'is this okay' he didn't bother with 'will you resent me in the morning.' Harry was his, something he wanted to hold onto and understand, and he knew the answers would be "Probably" and "Probably not" in the end. Harry was warm, breathing in shuddering gasps, toast rack chest rising and falling beneath his fingertips. Warm and alive, reaching up for the back of Draco's head, pulling him forward for a kiss that missed and landed somewhere in the region of his jaw, which Draco took advantage of anyway, tasting the dusty cellar on Harry's smooth skin.

It could have been hours, or possibly moments until Draco rolled around and pillowed Harry's head against his arm, pressing gentle chaste kisses to the curve of Harry's neck, feeling breath across his arm and time was still. Feeling that maybe, if he just wrapped his arms around Harry and never let him go the second would never end and they could stay like this forever.

"Please don't." There were hesitant fingers against his dark mark, roughly bitten nails pressed tenderly against the skull and Harry's sigh breathed out across them, sad, damp, and cold.

More gentle kisses, across his naked shoulders now and down to the curve of his spine where Draco met with the fine lumps of bone because Harry was still too thin and always had been. "It's okay," mumbled against the dusty skin, clocks started ticking again, his heart started beating and the arm that rested casually against Harry's stomach tightened because it was impossible to let go. "I don't love you."

Harry's thumb brushed across the mark and his mouth found the sensitive curve of Draco's elbow. "Thank you." A pause, eyes closed, the clock counted away precious second that they couldn't hear, "I don't love you either."

They understood each other.

* * *

Albus Dumbledore sighed heavily in the confines of his office; well that was it then. He had been monitoring the schools entrances and exits carefully, every one of them spelled to alarm should they be breached by a student. One student specifically. He had Nymphadora Tonks in his office just five hours ago informing him of the situation – the Aurors knew, without a shadow of a doubt where Voldemort would be at an exact moment in time and she was heading up the attack party. The efforts of the staff to keep an eye on Potter had mixed results, most of the order of the Phoenix was reluctant to agree that Harry may have turned coat and those members that did have their suspicions were somehow unable to monitor Potter on a regular basis. The boy could disappear for days at a time, and not even Dumbledore could locate him with any success. There were some places in Hogwarts school that simply weren't mapped, and lately, if Harry was sitting in the great hall it was nearly impossible to locate him with magic, even if someone could locate him with the common eye. Unable to track him across the campus magically, the Hogwarts staff had tried to locate Draco Malfoy, who they suspected was part of the whole thing, and had the same problems. Dumbledore had even tried the confiscated Marauders map, but Harry and Malfoy showed up in dozens of places at once; it was certainly perplexing.

At breakfast the previous morning Albus Dumbledore had broken one of his personal rules and for the first time probed a student's mind with Legilimency. The results were interesting, Severus had explained to him that Potter wanted to be taught Occlumency, but Harry's version of the magic was almost flawless, completely original and terrifyingly cold. Albus hadn't seen any of the boy's thoughts, only watched him poke his eggs around a plate for a bit and complain of a leg cramp. Malfoy had been different, instead of the glassy and terrifyingly empty surface of Harry's mind, Draco's revealed apprehension and a sort of mental nausea – but the source of that squirming feeling was veiled from him and Albus wondered with a vague sense of dread why they had put so much of themselves into concealing their thoughts from the world.

It worried him, made him fear for Harry and by proxy the world. If the son of an influential Death Eater and the suddenly apathetic Harry Potter were spending time together, there was going to be severe Death Eater activity tonight, and both Potter and Malfoy had slipped out through the hump of the witch statue and were on their way to Hogsmeade. Dumbledore buried his head in his hands and fought back tears. He'd done wrong by Harry and he could only truly blame himself for this. Dumbledore hoped fervently that he was wrong about his instincts and that Harry wasn't wandering off to become a death eater, he hoped that the wrongful death of his parents was incentive enough to keep him from straying to the darker nature of magic, he had been wrong. Harry's betrayal hurt, but at the same time Albus Dumbledore had made a study of humanity, and Harry was a classic case easily explained my muggle psychology. Dumbledore suspected there was so much rage in him that it had become resentment towards his parents, they had died and left him with the Dursleys, and any child growing up in that environment could only come out somewhat wrong. It was also Dumbledore's fault, and while he felt justified in his actions there was also a certain edge of guilt – he'd done what he had to do and the decision had come around to bite him, regardless of how Harry had grown up he had made a mistake in placing so much faith in the boy.

The boys had left the school premises now and were in Hogsmeade, he was watching them through a scrying crystal on his desk and through the stone he could practically feel their nervousness. There was nothing he could do about it now. He had made the decisions, had not been secret keeper for the Potters, had helped fulfill a prophecy because it had to happen, had placed Harry with the Dursleys to teach him humility and it all backfired. Albus wasn't going to move to stop the proceedings – what would happen would happen, and he would deal with the fall out. He liked Harry well enough, but the boy's decisions were own – he couldn't be blamed if Harry had seen merit in the dark arts. Malfoy rummaged around in his bag and pulled out a book, somewhere in the back of his mind Albus Dumbledore was already planning the press conference.

Que sera sera.

* * *

They walked through Hogsmeade very slowly. Harry didn't know what to think about anything, everything that had happened in the past few months was so completely unexpected that recent developments should not have surprised him at all and yet – he couldn't let it go. His brain kept skittering back to the one topic, Malfoy hovering over him staring ravenously and he'd blush, look away, and get queasy. They walked past Madam Puddifoot's where Harry had his first proper date, Malfoy said "Did you want to get a cup of coffee?"

"You can be such a girl sometimes." Harry said, and laughed. They continued on in silence, sneaking glances at each other in the dark until they reached the Hog's Head Inn, where Hogsmeade main tapered off into small housing developments. This was the end of the line, the tour had ended, it was time to go, and Harry took another look around Hogsmeade, trying to absorb everything, remember every detail that had happened here and in the big castle on the hill. He wanted to remember every nuance, keep it with him no matter what happened, and how happy he had been here, however briefly. It made him sick, and he was afraid. He looked at Malfoy, trying to absorb that too, and fighting the terrible urge to back out, because Malfoy had been right, he always was.

"Harry… you ready?" He nodded silently, too afraid of what he might say if he opened his mouth. 'I'm sorry, please I'm sorry, don't let's do this.' "Hold on to this then." Harry nodded again and grasped at the binding of the ragged book that Draco held out to him. 'No no no, I'm sorry, you shouldn't, let's run away together.' "Ready?" A nod. 'I love you I love you I love you I don't want to die…' "Portus." And he didn't have time to think of the way Draco's teeth clacked around the consonants before he was yanked away.

* * *

Tonks waved her team forward through the undergrowth, glaring at them to silence themselves with every step. They weren't relying on magic for this one, there were going to be no silencing spells, no listening spells, not invisibility spells – nothing would be cast unless it was absolutely necessary. Previously enchanted items were okay as far as those things went, the magical resonance of the area was high enough that previously charmed things would fall by the wayside on a magical signature, but little spikes of blooms that represented a cast spell on a magical map would be instantaneously recognizable and deadly to whomever was casting. Fortunately getting Weams to shut the fuck up did not require a spell, but Tonks was seriously inclined to use violence, the rookie that replaced Pelgrave was still wet behind the ears and Tonks regretted taking him along.

The area was muggle, a rough parking lot by the looks of things, covered over in the gravel and grit from hundreds of different automobiles and conveniently surrounded by low scrub and hills – technically none of the aurors had any idea of where they were, only that the Dark Lord was scheduled to show up and that they were moving to eliminate him. It was convenient for them because the low hills offered cover, and even more convenient for the death eaters because they were in an openly muggle area and were perfectly concealed from the casual glance. Any muggle that got close enough for more than a glance would be dead before he could begin to process what his eyes told him. Two death eaters abruptly apparated into existence, showing up as hot orange flares on Tonks' thaumic map of the area and startling a few of her rookies, she growled, "Steady, hold position."

The Death Eaters began casting, small things that showed up as green and blue sparks, wards, surveillance spells, testing for magic in the area just as they were. The low thrum of grey on the map that signaled the auror presence went completely unnoticed by the death eater probes, and she sighed in relief as the two robed figures moved towards each other casually. It was like a secret club meeting of ten year olds, the rules have to be respected, the locks checked, the curtains pulled tight, and then they slumped back into their routine of discussing last weeks canapés because these were men that knew each other, saw each other every day and could chat about work until the boss arrived. More and more of the black robed figures began to filter in, orange flares on her map indicating apparition points, and none of them were near the grey area, much to the collective relief of all aurors on sight.

She threw her hand out, gesturing efficiently for audio surveillance which had actually been stolen from the Weasley twins. Those boys were geniuses, if they used their powers for military advancement as opposed to entertainment they could have been officers by now, or established minds in the world of military technology. At Easter, Tonks had eaten dinner with the Weasley family and the Order of the Phoenix, she had, in a word, stolen some of the Twins' famous Extendable ears and spent a few days modifying them. The result was a pre-enchanted audio track that could not be seen by the ordinary eye. No longer was there the track of fleshy ear cover extending across the ground, but the Extendable Ear was camouflaged, so long as it stayed still, it was invisible. When the ear moved the picture tended to warp a bit, like one of Mad Eye Moody's invisibility spells. They were a clever toy, and as her subordinates moved to place the ears she placed the end pieces in her ears, listening intently to the conversations that passed. For the most part she was right, they were casual, how's your daughter, were you at the business meeting last Tuesday, but at last the final character arrived on the scene the entire convention straightened up and bowed reverently, a few of them muttering 'master' in his wake. Voldemort had arrived.

"Hold your positions." Kingsley's voice was so low it was nearly a sub-sonic growl in their ears and Tonks actually had to reach out and grab Weams' ankle to keep him from bolting. It wasn't like the old days when they could just bust in, take down what they needed to, and be home for dinner. This sort of an operation took time and planning, they couldn't go in flying by the seat of their pants because they would all die – it was particularly rough on Weams – this was the kid's first field assignment and Tonks pitied him. "Tonksy?"

They were practically blind, as the Death Eater's had used an advanced version of a put-outer to kill all the lights in the parking lot, but they could still hear clearly and watch from the map where the magic was happening. Tonks was cheating a bit, her natural metamorphagi abilities allowing her to slowly adapt her eyesight for dark and distance – when she got home she would have a headache for two days as her natural eyesight reasserted itself – but Tonks wasn't too worried about it. When she got home, she could deal with that, if she got home. "That's him all right."

They couldn't move, not just yet. Voldemort would be fresh, the death eaters would be prepared until the meeting had progressed a bit further. The Aurors would have to sit, cold and frightened watching for the moment when Voldemort became more relaxed, and Tonks feared for what her eyes might see, but they couldn't move yet. She didn't know what she would do when the moment came, if she could charge in firing spells or if she would simply freeze – she was no Albus Dumbledore, and even he had suffered for his battle with the Dark Lord. She had been there in the intervening months before the school year started anew, he had been propped up by willpower and scaffolding until the students of Hogwarts were gone, then had gone to sleep and hadn't regained consciousness for weeks. Tonks knew she wouldn't wake up. "We wait."

As soon as the words had left her mouth there was a huge thaumic reading on the map, three times as large as any of the apparition points and trailing off into the distance like the tail of a comet. Tonks forced her eyesight to improve dramatically and fought through the horrendous migraine to see who had portkeyed into the vicinity and blanched. Harry Potter was just climbing to his feet in a circle of Death Eaters, and she was absolutely helpless to move. "Oh my god…"

* * *

Sorry if this chapter seemed short – okay, so I doubt it did because I'm not known for my long chapters but… still. My apologies. Now... you know you want to review. I mean, okay, it's hardly suspenseful, we all know what just happened... but don't you want to know what's _going _to happen? 


	33. Tuesday Night part 2

**Disclaimer: **Let us look at logic. A is not B. B, then C. If A is not B, not A then C. Put another way: I am not J.K. Rowling. J.K. Rowling owns Harry Potter. If I am not J.K. Rowling, I cannot own Harry Potter.

**Author's Notes: **Not much to say here – this is chapter 33, the end of the cliff hanger from hell and you'll probably hate me for this first segment, but this was a last ditch attempt to become better acquainted with Voldemort, who is actually pretty fascinating as characters go. I had plans for him, big plans indeed, but somewhere along the way they got caught up in the Harry/Draco learning Legilimens thing and the Dumbledore thinking Harry's a death eater thing and I just sort of forgot about him. So let's all give a round of applause for Lord Voldemort for being our magnanimous villain, and Enjoy the story!

**Special thanks to: **

**Intelligent Designer: **I usually try to start these things out with a "Thank you" But the bold heading at the top of the paragraph does that for me. So I figure I'll just comment on the review itself. Hee. I'm really happy you're liking this story – it's always good to know that new people are reading it and enjoying it, and I'm happy you think it's original. I have spent so many years reading Harry Potter fanfiction that I can't help but recognize little things in various chapters from other stories, there's a scene, for example, where I was up until 5 am reading some very odd (not very good) story and it somehow got incorporated, like it was my story and I was responsible for changing it. Early morning hallucinations apparently equal decent story ideas… go figure. But I was hoping the overall effect would be different, and I'm always happy to hear that people get it, like it, and think it's cool. And yeah. The title. I like it too, couldn't think up a more appropriate one if I tried (and believe me, I tried). Anyway, thanks so much for reviewing and here's hoping I hear from you again.

**PaddycakePadfoot: **In all fairness you deserve at least three of these little blurbs but there are some days when I just don't have any idea what to say except to share with you my frustration over Seriously… I was pissed, they wouldn't let me post for weeks so naturally I was squirming and hoping that you wouldn't abandon me, and then when I was posting no one seemed to be reading it. Naturally there was inner wailing. With any luck though will get their alert system back up and running, because it's driving me bonkers not knowing what's been posted and what hasn't. In other news "Bwahahaha!" I am SO glad you like the Harry/Draco dynamic, I was really happy about it (seriously, the walk through Hogsmeade where Draco offers to buy Harry a cup of coffee and Harry called him a girl… I started crying, but then, I also cried when I killed Ron). When I had that all plotted out I was in a "will not be girly" stage, and really I'm still in a "refuse to be girly" stage so you'll notice there aren't a lot of sentimental declarations of never-ending love, and people don't cuddle up with one another and call each other endearments like 'poppet' and 'luv'. Really, there is nothing that bothers me more than the 'luv' endearment, but that's probably because I read Buffy fanfic. I just thought it would be a lot simpler, and frankly a lot more genuine if there was less sap and fewer 'rose clenched between the teeth, on bended knee, magical protective ring in hand' antics. There is love at the end though – I can promise it because I've always been a sucker for a happy ending – it's just not mushy or saccharine love. I'm so happy you don't hate me for doing that. Though I wish, and it would be so easy to do, that I could take up several pages explaining every little thing that I intended with various sentences, or bits of the story that I think are understated, and I'm relieved that I don't have to – besides, it would be a bloody boring read. You've pretty much said all I would have had to say on these chapters anyway, pointed out what I liked about them and enchanted me with the silvery tongued magic of flattery. You've been reading this story like I wanted it to be read and I am just… thrilled. Beyond belief. So the next chapters are definitely for you. P.S. About the language, I thought I'd mention it since you got such a kick out of it, boy am I glad I prefer British Slang - twat beats cooter any day. I generally try not to curse that much in any fic (I do curse that much in real life, more actually but that's a byproduct of where I work and who I spend time with) because I think it's a little unprofessional, but they're sixteen year old boys - you'd probably be hard pressed in any culture to find a sixteen year old boy that doesn't think cursing like a sailor is cool. Cracks me up. P.P.S I posted your Egg on Malf0yM0nkeys, I didn't know how else to go about it.

* * *

Chapter 33 – Tuesday Night part 2.

When Tom Riddle was very young he spent his evenings lying in quiet contemplation, listening to the communal snores of his fellow orphans and planning the hundreds of thousands of ways he could escape. It wasn't as though it were a bad place; the children there were pleasant enough in a sort of desperate and grungy way, polite because being exiles of common society enforced behavioral patterns of absolute submission to the upper echelons. He lay awake at nights thinking of the destruction of the human race, half formed thoughts of arson and genocide filtered through his dreams as he thought of taking down the orphanage and everything around it. The so called generous families with their two point five children making paltry donations for tax purposes and the sixty-something women that stopped by in their ugly tweed jackets with pies for 'the poor little dears' every other Sunday, he wanted to personally ruin them all.

When he'd turned eleven, a member from Muggleborn Integration Division had personally delivered his Hogwarts letter and things changed, he'd gone from being the unusually quiet and observant boy in the corner of the room to an unknown entity, something to be feared and resented even by his fellow outcasts and it made him that much angrier. Something within him had always been hateful and strange, but he'd now been given the perfect excuse and the perfect weapon – magic and destruction had been handed to him on a platter. Secrecy was a habit now and the moment he'd been sorted into Slytherin his new dorm mates had taken it on principal that he was a pure blood despite not knowing who his parents were – the gift of parseltongue had only reinforced this image. In the early fifties it was no secret that purebloods were still the most prominent force in wizardom, mudbloods and muggleborns were only beginning to step out of the woodwork, climbing corporate ladders and making protests against segregation and unequal treatment. Any intelligent young pureblood with a decent set of ears and his wits intact could go far in this world, which was exactly what he intended to do.

Listening carefully to the secret mutterings of his older dorm mates and their obvious distaste of the muggle race gave him the motive he needed and by the time he reached fourteen he had a plan. Unrefined and inelegant but a plan nonetheless – the unfocused hatred he carried with him for fourteen years had found an avenue of release and a sort of mania had developed no longer manifesting itself in uncontrolled bursts of destructive magic. At fifteen the invented anagram of Lord Voldemort had replaced Tom Marvolo Riddle even in his mind. Seven years of listening to the uneducated political propaganda of his fellow students and their adoring parents had given him the keen edge of posturing and playing to a crowd without obvious falsities and he built his army from the ground, collecting the brightest students from his year and below, using the biases of the blind aristocracy against them. At nineteen he'd found his father and took great joy in killing him ruthlessly. It was the first time he'd used the killing curse, and he had never regretted it. That was the day he became Voldemort to the world at large.

He could have lobbied legitimately against the integration of muggles into their society – if too much muggle blood was mixed in among the pure lines the whole wizarding world would eventually die out. Sure, some people would still see sparks when others sneezed, but there would no longer be tangible magic, and that was something that neither Voldemort nor Tom Riddle could bear the thought of. But legitimate forums had never done well by Tom Riddle and Voldemort had no reason to suspect he would be regarded differently. Politics were for the weak-minded individuals that were too afraid to get their hands dirty – and he got his hands dirty. By the age of twenty five Lord Voldemort had a following of twenty men all working towards the same goal – the complete obliteration of the Muggle race.

Those days he had been secretive, afraid of being found out by the local authorities and prosecuted to the full extent of the law, or what passed for it. He began to realize then that nothing he and his compatriots said was going to have an effect, his followers were muttering disconsolately in his direction, too afraid of his genius to say anything outright, but also discontent with the seeming inaction. He began to change, trained his followers and minions in the dark arts, steeped his own magic so deeply in darkness that his wand forgot how to cast light magic and he made his plans. Made designs on muggle parliament because action needed to be taken on a larger scale, he and his followers would have to cease picking off orphanages and old defenseless biddies, and the organization would have to grow. He became cruel. It was something that came easy after a cold life full of distant people, he made the transformation from icy necessity to out-and-out maliciousness. At the age of thirty seven he was ruthlessly torturing his followers when they made mistakes, under the rumor and subsequent truth that old pureblood families had done the same with their children for generations – it only made them respect him more. Voldemort and his conservative party then became Voldemort and the Death Eaters.

They reigned terror on all of Great Britain, leaving their mark wherever they attacked with no fear of repercussion. The authorities were powerless in the face of such sheer affront to commonly accepted laws. Many of the Death Eaters were influential members of the Ministry and if they weren't, they strove to become so at his command. Laws were re-written banning activities such as Muggle hunting and new military organizations were instated with one goal in mind. He defined terrorism for the next decade and he was proud of it. His followers then began to have children, much to his amazement, and he realized the potential for armies of impressionable youths answerable only to him, and the world was powerless to stop him.

And at the height of his power it all came crashing down – Voldemort seethed. Brought to his knees by one boy who was in no way remarkable, and the Death Eaters scattered. Finally the Ministry of Magic got its act together and found some way to subdue his loyal subjects, with him gone the authorities became bullies, herding proud Death Eaters together and locking them in the most horrible place on earth – which turned them insane, and cruel, and even deadlier for his return. Now, several years later he was more powerful than ever and the boy was popping into existence at his feet to kneel. The world turned in such marvelous ways, and Voldemort couldn't help but laugh at his fortune – at long last, it seemed, things were going his way, and Harry Potter would give the gift of his life in servitude for his new master.

"Ah, Mister Potter. So nice to finally see you again."

* * *

Harry stumbled into existence, trying not to throw up as his body got its bearings - traveling by portkey had been a mistake, he was always queasy afterwards, and there was no time. Voldemort was standing before him, watching him expectantly as he verified that his body was all where it was supposed to be, and then the pain began. Running in a line down Harry's forehead and digging into his brain. It felt like his scar was on fire and all his bones were rebelling against the presence of Voldemort, the thin and insignificant scar he'd received from Wormtail's knife after the Tri-wizard tournament was burning too, and he wondered if Voldemort could feel it too, in his blood. "My lord…" he gasped out, blanking his mind, finding the pain on his body and using every sense he had to feel the world around him before meeting Voldemort's eyes.

Faceless and mindless minions darted forward to take his wand from him, and Harry couldn't remember what his wand was for. It was just a stick to him now, and though the robed figures held it gingerly, as though it would explode, Harry had no idea why. Malfoy stepped away from him as soon as he had his bearings on the universe, the ground was down, the sky was up, everything else fell somewhere between, except that Malfoy wasn't propping him up anymore so the between was somewhat off kilter. Harry was shaking, and he could not feel beyond a sense of tiredness there was no fear, there was pain, and there was cold, and there was confusion, but there was no fear.

Something seemed to be expected of him, and Harry had no idea what it was – he was doing as he'd always done, standing before the Dark lord and staring him in the eye. His eyes hurt, he could feel them burning, threatening to melt out of his skull and he knew without the shadow of a doubt that Voldemort could kill him with a thought. It was terrifying, it was exhilarating. Draco kicked him in the back of the knee and he fell, realizing at last what it was he should have been doing. "Ah, thank you Mister Malfoy."

"My Lord." Draco acknowledged softly, eyes downcast, and Harry hated it. He sat back on his heels, keeping his eyes trained on his hands and waiting for Voldemort to speak, because there was no way he could begin this conversation without incriminating himself.

Harry couldn't quite remember why he was here, it had something to do with Ron, or maybe something to do with himself, Voldemort was sending him images, feelings, the overwhelming urge to die and the pain in his head was pushing his Occlumency to new highs. He focused on it, redirected it to his hands, and his knees, and his stomach, trying not to let the Dark Lord in, trying to do something right for the first time ever. Why was he here? "I heard a rumor…" Said the Dark Lord dramatically, Harry wondered vaguely if he knew he looked like a twit, and focused on not focusing, "that you have something for me… to make amends you might say?"

Harry tried to search for Malfoy, who had melted into the crowd amongst the masked faces, and couldn't find him. Make amends, was that what he was doing? Was that what everyone deserved from him, his parents, Sirius, Ron, and Hagrid, did they deserve that? Harry suddenly hated himself intensely, and wondered if that weren't Voldemort inside his skull, maybe having found a way past his barriers. He was scared. He was dying, he'd given himself over to the concept months ago, knew he wouldn't make it to his seventh year, knew in his heart of hearts that something would happen that would kill him. And he had tried so hard, so hard to avoid this and when the boundaries of possibility had stretched as far as they could go he had snapped back hard, running headlong into this situation as he always had, a little more prepared, a little more time to anticipate, a little more time to regret. Harry twisted around and reached into his bag, brought along for this sole purpose, and dragged out the Bacchus flute. The bag slid from his shoulder and he stumbled forward, barely remembering to remain on his knees and his head burned with every shuffling inch.

The gravel under his knees stung as he crawled forward, scraping into the bony joints, digging miniscule holes in the fabric of his robes. The cup was clutched in his hands, and Harry was desperate not to drop it, not to betray himself to this monolithic terror before him. The dark lord was smiling, it was not a happy sight, and Harry stilled, head down, arms holding the goblet before him in what he could only hope was reverent adoration. This was some strange sacrifice, some bizarre religious act, sanctimonious and hideous, the dark lord reached for him. Harry thought of nothing as those spider-like hands closed around his wrists - he thought of deep black fields of nothingness stretching away into eternity – his arms ached and burned with the pressure of Voldemort's hands, bones creaking in his grip – thoughts of nothing skittered across the glassy surface of his mind, nothing nothing nothing, and somewhere surrounded by this bleak and nothing world was Voldemort.

He never had a talent for acting, it was never something he'd invested time in developing, and the expressions in his soul tended to play upon his face like muggle cinema. He was desperate now, he needed this to work, he needed Voldemort to accept his claim, he hoped, and prayed, and controlled muscles he didn't know he had in the effort not to recoil, not to spit, not to writhe and scream on the spot. "This is quite a gift Mister Potter." He said finally, Harry's ears wanted to bleed, but a look of hope forced its way upon his face and stuck there in a rictus of glory. "Aquifo" the Dark Lord said dropping his wrists, and "I'm sure you wouldn't mind testing it for us?"

So Harry drank, it tasted of water and death, because Harry couldn't imagine wanting anything so much as he wanted to be away from this monster, and he couldn't imagine drinking anything even as his throat contracted in a painful swallow. "My lord…" he said over the acid on his tongue, but couldn't force a statement of undying fealty, and his silence was taken as reverence.

The hatred flowing through him now was unbearable as Voldemort smiled condescendingly and patted him on the head, removing the small chalice from his hands. "Harry Potter seeks to bring me life." He said, and a dull and bureaucratic chuckle rose from amidst the ranks of Death Eaters surrounding them, his heart was pounding in his ears. The pain had not yet begun but Harry was shaking, unable to look up, he wanted to rage, wanted the brutality of conflict, wanted to dig his fingernails into Voldemort's eyes and rip out his heart with his bare hands. Harry needed the Dark Lord to understand the full depths of the hatred that stung his eyes and kept him up of nights, plotting, planning, dreaming the day when he could exhaust himself with violence, patiently waiting for him to simply… drink.

* * *

Peter Petigrew was at war with himself as was so often the case. It may as well have been James Potter on his knees before the Dark Lord, James who'd so wronged him in history and James who wasn't strong enough to keep him. But try as he might to delude himself, Wormtail had to admit that it wasn't. This was Harry, Harry Potter, mortal enemy of one Lord Voldemort, and constant reminder that life had not gone as it should have for Peter. The boy was supposed to be dead; he was supposed to have died sixteen years ago, and Wormtail was to have risen to a place of power beside his Lord.

Peter wasn't supposed to have bottle-fed his Lord for over a year, he wasn't supposed to have lost his hand to resurrect his master, he wasn't supposed to have lived for twelve years in constant squeaking fear of death from both sides. Everything that had gone wrong in his life was the fault of a Potter. A Potter who called himself his best friend, a Potter that had saved his life.

His master took the softly glowing tableware from Harry's outstretched palms, and Peter opened his mouth to shout a warning to The Dark Lord against Potter's intentions. All year he'd been sneaking under tables, all year he'd been a rat, clattering along in the dungeons and following the young Hero from destination to destination, for weeks he'd hidden in a bathroom with a soppy girl and watched that very cup simmer in a cauldron full of poison. Finally he would have his revenge on the Potter line for ruining his world, but his mouth stayed shut. Harry Potter had saved his life, he owed a debt.

He couldn't do it, not really. He liked the boy, he'd personally witnessed everything the Dark Lord had ever thrown at him and he was so broken now, it hadn't taken much, barely a push, and maybe that was the difference between Harry and his father. The boy was willing to die for a memory, didn't go into hiding when his life was threatened – didn't have a friend like Peter around to kill him – he couldn't' do it.

* * *

Draco Malfoy hardly dared to breathe as he stood in the clearing, watching this debacle. It was sport, it was entertainment, Harry was doing so well and Draco could hardly keep himself from tearing across the circle to remove them both from this nightmare. His breath stuck in his throat, beside him his father looked on with approval at the cowed former-hero, and in the Dark Lord's hands the tiny chalice filled with liquid light that sparkled purple. Life, pure and simple life, Draco had expected it to be blue. He stayed impassive, he stayed silent, he knew the expression on Harry's face. He could see the cringing pain at the corners of his eyes, Draco could see Harry's skin fade from pale to sickly in the magical light of a hundred wands and he held his breath as the Dark Lord drank.

There was a moment of tense silence from all parties, Voldemort expecting to be returned to his former glory through the aid of the elixir of life, the Death eaters both proud and fearful as their master returned, and Draco, hoping to all magicians and martyrs that things would work. He knew with a sick feeling that it wouldn't, things would be too easy if that happened – not everybody walked in the light, and Harry's luck would have to run out eventually. Draco let the cold impassivity settle over his body and prepared to say goodbye. It would be far too simple, it would be like the messenger arriving on time to the battle, it would be like Oedipus taking the chance and staying with his adoptive parents, it would be like catching the last train home ten minutes after it's scheduled departure – things like this didn't work out for people like them. It couldn't work, and it didn't.

"Poison, Potter? How quaint." There was a shocked murmur from the assembled death eaters, and then a collective groan of sudden pain; the sensation of needles shot through Draco's arm and into his stomach, paralyzing him temporarily. It was moderate, like a cramp that slowly built into a stabbing thorn, caught in his side, and Draco swallowed it. He didn't have to ask where it was from, knew instinctively that Voldemort was sending them this pain, all of them, and they were responding to the mild aches as they always had, it shortened their tempers, made them cruel, made them no better than dogs with particularly fancy tricks. Draco closed his eyes against the pain in his gut, it wasn't much, wasn't a spot on what Harry would be feeling, and Draco opened them again. Draco didn't want to watch this – it hurt too much, his heart ached with it, everything they had worked for led up to this and he knew all along that this would happen. Harry was going to die, they had resigned themselves to that weeks ago, whether the antidote worked or not, Harry would die. The only question that remained was whether the Dark Lord would go too. So Draco did what he would have had his bones not been aching, staring, one eyebrow raised gently at Harry, who had remained on his knees not out of deference, but in agony. His stomach must have been churning, desperate not to vomit out its meager contents because that would only accelerate the pain – Draco knew this, he had read, they had prepared – it seemed so pointless now.

He owed it to the proceedings to watch them carefully, to absorb everything and when he was met on the other side of life he could give an accurate report of events to the gatekeepers. He owed it to the soon deceased Potter to witness everything. The dark lord, thus far, had been extremely reasonable and Draco didn't let his mind wander towards what that could mean – he knew from experience that the more reasonable he was at first the worse things would go for the intended victim. He had watched the Dark Lord maim and torture his followers, and cringed away from the screams of his enemies and his experiments – Harry was not going to be a fortunate case of ash on the concrete. Voldemort had taken the time to think the time to siphon off the pain from the poison to his minions, he had taken the time to think – and Draco feared that more than anything. "Mister Potter, we do not appreciate betrayal amongst our ranks."

* * *

"Merlin's balls, Nymphadora, did you hear that?" It was Kingsley's turn on the extendable ears, and Tonks nearly went deaf having compensated there too, making her ears longer and larger, fine tuning the small bones and curves for the best distance amplification. She would be surprised if her head didn't explode in the morning.

She had heard, nodded slowly to appease the raging headache, and began to cry with relief. It was a sick feeling, to be so happy and so terrified, to be so openly pleased because someone had turned out all right after all. Harry had always been a good kid in her eyes, moody and depressed, especially after her cousin's death, but a good kid. Someone that stood by what he believed, or what he thought he believed, and Tonks was just so damned happy to hear she'd been right, despite all the rumors, the accusations, and the eventual proof – Tonks had been right about him. No more being disappointed in herself and the order of the phoenix for not doing a better job, not cringing every time she thought of Sirius Black spinning in his grave, and the sheer buoyant relief nearly masked her simultaneous dismay.

Harry had been on their side all along, and now he was going to die on their side for doing what people wanted of him. Harry was going to die, and she couldn't do a damned thing about it. Couldn't move in, because Voldemort would crush them if they made themselves known, she couldn't do anything but watch him die now, and her tears were genuine. "I heard… hold your positions."

* * *

"I find it strange that you've chosen to kill yourself, Potter." Voldemort, or possibly Tom Riddle said distantly, "It's a pity – we could have been great allies…" Draco tried not to applaud the look in Harry's eyes. Murderous was hardly adequate, and it was the most fire, most _anything _he'd seen from Potter all year, possibly ever. 'Allies' was an idiot's fancy, and the entire assembled party knew that long before they'd agreed to the meeting. "Still, I suppose we should make your last moments as comfortable as possible."

The Death Eater's moved as though cued by a secret signal, like sharks moving in on bleeding flesh. It was a familiar pattern to Draco, who had seen this often enough to know the true horror of it. They formed a slow circle around Harry, and Draco took his place in the line, preparing his wand and his mind for what was to come. The man standing at Voldemort's right, with his permission, would extend the first spell, sometimes completely harmless with excruciating potential, and the circle would move on. One man at a time casting spell after spell at the intended victim – the traitor – until Voldemort himself decided to end things – it could continue for hours, the victim becoming more and more maimed and pathetic until they were hardly recognizable as human. The wizard's roulette would spin and spin, and nobody could anticipate when Voldemort would end this particular game.

"Petrificus Totalus." The torch was passed, "Crucio." Harry's eyes rolled wildly, and the next voice did his damage. "Finite Incantatum" He thrashed so hard against the pain he broke his own collarbone. It was a joke in the circle, the effect of pain on an untrained human – and Draco knew that Harry had been trained, had trained from birth to withstand abuse. The old familiar favorites made their appearance, and it was cruel beyond belief to so much as tickle a drinker of Azrael's Mercy, but pain made Death Eater's cruel, and they were now receiving that in spades. Harry coughed blood, he cracked his own skull against the asphalt, his fingers bent themselves backwards, the skin on his left arm tightened and cracked. It went on, and on, and Draco watched helplessly from his place in the line, knowing that he couldn't contribute to this macabre scene and knowing that if he didn't it would be him in the circle.

Draco raised his wand when the turn was his and felt… horror. There was Voldemort, there was Harry. There was his father, encouraging him, staring at him proudly through his madness, there were the Death eaters, and there was his future. He seethed. Draco hated everything about this, and there was Harry on the ground writhing in pain because he was the only person who had tried and tried again to foolishly face the dark lord, and the only person who would be so moronic to try with a household poison, and the only person Draco had left in the world. He made a decision. If he did this then Harry would die instantly, which was a kindness to him, and even he would die eventually, though it might take days. It was the best thing either of them could hope for, the chance to die with some dignity, not spending his entire worthless life toadying to the Dark Lord like a mindless child until he died was more than his family had hoped for him, more than his father achieved. Draco raised his wand, pointed it at Harry, allowed himself to feel everything that he couldn't before, wanted to say 'I'm sorry' wanted to say 'thank you' wanted to say a thousand things and didn't: "Avada Kedavra"

The world exploded.

* * *

He could feel in the pit of his stomach the poison, wending its way through his blood as he swam in nausea. His muscles burned, the pain in his head increased threefold and the light washed over him in a cold wave of inevitability, taking with it the little he knew to be certain about the world. The people around him screamed and thrashed but Harry couldn't understand why. Behind his eyes flashed blinding pain, a sick triumph that was not his consumed him.

Harry could feel himself screaming, but the sound was lost among the roars of everyone else, amplified in his ears. It burned, every part of the soul he labeled 'Harry Potter' was on fire and mad with pain, he held on to it, fighting everything and understood that when he died he would at least have something to show for it. It struggled against him, this white fire that had previously tried so desperately to engulf him. He forgot who he was, who he was struggling for, why he fought to wrap his mind around this thing, to destroy it, there was only the pain, and the roar of the world – Harry felt himself fall, and he let go.

* * *

"MOVE MOVE MOVE!" The sudden roar in the silence over the camped Auror teams was the perfect accompaniment to the blinding green wash of light that swept over the parking lot. If anyone had been looking at the thaumic map they might have seen the point of origin, but the curse was washing across the entire parking lot before it vanished. People in the lot were screaming, clawing at their eyes and drumming their heels against the gritty concrete before falling limp, and as the aurors scrambled into the lot, casting stunning spells they realized that none of their spells would do any good. The quarry had fallen without their assistance, and there was no one standing to stun. "All right men!" Shacklebolt roared over the milling confusion of too many aurors in one place, tripping over unconscious bodies and each other. Tonks took up the call, as did Lockheed, the only other officer within shouting range. "I want a Vitae charm cast on every person here – if they're alive restrain them, take their wands. If they're dead…"

"IF THEY'RE DEAD! You know what to do, roll 'em, grab their wands, and lay 'em out! I want those dark marks showing – and keep it clean people!" Tonks took over from that point, screaming out orders and directing aurors to clumps of still bodies because Kingsley was checking pulses and rolling corpses, and doing what he always had done – which was getting up to his elbows in muck. "YOU! No, not you Weams, MURPHY! Get your arse to the nearest floo and get a cleanup crew in here!"

"LIEUTENANT!" Tonks jumped, she couldn't remember the last time she'd been called "Lieutenant" though that was technically her rank, it must have been one of Lockheed's men, who she hadn't had the opportunity to familiarize herself with, but she was the nearest officer and went where she had been called. "Lieutenant… it's… it's…."

The man was stuttering in terror and pointing one shaking finger at the ground about two feet from his boots. "It's the Dark Lord." Tonks said hollowly, dropping to her knees and doing the unthinkable by checking him for a pulse. The man was repulsive – more so than he had been a year previously, and not a man at all – he was humanoid and that was about as close as it got, completely bald, bleached of skin tone and his eyes were black and empty – Tonks shuddered and poked the corpse with her wand.

"The Dark lord…"

"He's dead." Tonks smiled unconsciously, giving the corpse of the Dark Lord a few good smacks for her mental health, "He's dead… he's…" Tonks shook her head and climbed to her feet, kicking Voldemort's corpse once or twice before barking out an order. "Follow Murphy, get on the floo – I want everyone in the country to know by morning that Harry Potter killed the Dark Lord."

* * *

The backwash that swept over them was momentous, it felt like his body was being shaken apart at the seams, Draco had closed his eyes hoping to die and had opened them a few brief seconds later lying amongst the bodies of his comrades and his friends – and Harry. He was cold, it hurt to breathe, there were needles in his blood that he could feel, twisting and scraping across his veins and grinding where the lodged against his bones. Harry was lying in the center of the circle of Death Eaters, he had to get there, picked himself up and crawled by the elbows, muscles screaming and bones grinding in their sockets, as he dragged himself forwards. There were people, shadows of people on the edges of his vision, swarming the place and yelling in languages he didn't understand. He couldn't see, the world was shades of blurry grey that wouldn't reconcile themselves into clear images, and his head throbbed in time with each heart beat, but Harry was in front of him somewhere, and he kept crawling. He didn't want to, hadn't even meant to hurt him, and maybe at first Malfoy hadn't minded whether Harry lived or died, but Draco had never intended to kill him. Especially now, especially not after everything.

He felt like he was dying, like all of his muscles were slowly tearing apart and his heart was pounding it's way into pulp, but he was going to get there. Nothing in the universe made sense in the moment but getting to where he needed to be. Not the shape that was looming ever nearer, nor the blinding pain, or any of the local geography that he could feel under his skin – nothing made sense but that, and as Harry's arm slowly swam into focus, Draco Malfoy reached out and took it – it was still warm. Then he finally succumbed to his body's demands and lost consciousness on the rough pavement.

* * *

Wow… there were a lot of different segments in that chapter. I didn't realize it until I was doing the page breaks – hoo boy. 


	34. Pray

**Caveman for a Disclaimer: **Me No Own Harry Potter. Me Sad. Urgh.

**Author's Notes: **This promises to be something of a long chapter, so long in fact that LJ wouldn't let me post it as one piece and I had to split it up for their benefit. I had considered posting it in two pieces but I did say that this would be a story in 35 parts, not 36, and I didn't want to have to post a two-part chapter again. I did think there was an interesting symmetry to the way LJ made me post it though. There are a few scenes where the general tone may be somewhat callous, I'm apologizing for that now – everything about this story is a little subdued because a war is starting and blah blah blah, but hey – life goes on right? Given that Voldemort just died people should be dancing in the halls, the fact that they're not just lends evidence to my occasional idiocy. Seriously, I can't believe I over looked that but I don't want to have to go fix it – rest assured I am kicking myself. Shoot. Anyway, enjoy the chapter, I'm going to be in a corner somewhere banging my head against the wall.

**Special thanks to: **

**Loxodonta-magica:** Glad it looked interesting (if you made it this far anyway) – don't you hate it when work interferes with the reading of fanfiction? I'm never awake early enough before work to get started, because I know that if I do I don't have the will power to haul my butt into work. Anyway – if you made it far enough to be reading this, thank you so much and I hope you've enjoyed it.

**Intelligent Designer: **For some reason when I read your review I just started laughing, it was great. Don't ask me why though, I probably couldn't tell you. I always felt special too, when I was reading a lot of fanfiction (and I mean a lot, seriously, I'd go for days reading and reviewing everything I could get my hands on… kinda sad really) and an author/authoress would stick my handle at the top of their fic and say 'thanks' I always did the glee dance. So do feel special, because I do appreciate it, and that sounds way corny so I'm going to stop before I have to start stuffing my foot in with a mallet. On whether or not Draco killed Voldemort – I'm gonna go ahead and give you the spoiler of 'kinda'. See, the thing is I don't explain it very well so by the end of chapter 35 I wouldn't be surprised if people aren't banging down my door demanding explanations, and the answer to whether Draco killed Voldemort or not is definitely 'kinda'. All in all it was sort of an anti-climax really… Draco casting Avada Kedavra was definitely what killed Voldemort – but you've got to wonder who he really cast it at. I'm really no good at suspense – or explaining myself in my actual stories without sounding trite, so I generally avoid it. I may have pages and pages of notes on exactly how many ohms go into the power transfers for transfigurations assignments, but can I explain how Voldemort died? Nope. No I sure cannot. I should probably end this here before I take up too much page space, but I'm really happy you're enjoying the story and that you like Draco's character; he was supposed to be a snotty, prancing, little twerp in this story but he became someone I actually like, and with any luck he'll live up to your expectations for this one.

**Jillian: **Sorry you found it a little gruesome - I was going for morbid really, but gruesome works too. I guess Death Eaters are all about the ceremonies and really being big meanies. I've always figured them as some stupid cross between a Frat House and the KKK so yeah - gruesome works just fine. In response to your other statement - I'm glad you think my characters are realistic. When I was a kid I had an English teacher tell me that if we all went around acting like our favorite book characters we'd be shot on merit of sheer irritation, and I find that the more I write, the more I see the truth in that - humans are fairly uninteresting unless their lives are magnified because it all happens in our heads and, at the risk of sounding completely arrogant and frankly smarmy, I tried to mimic that. Especially in the earlier chapters most of what made Harry infuriating happened in his head, I'm happy you not only put up with the constant and repetitive introspection, but liked it. So thank you, and with any luck the finale won't disappoint.

**PaddycakePadfoot: **Your theories are probably about a thousand times better than anything I could come up with so I'm rather glad you didn't detail them. God knows I'd be kicking myself if you had; like I said to Intelligent Designer, I have problems explaining my science. That in mind, here's hoping you don't lose all respect for me as you read the final two chapters. Things sort of wrap up quickly, I realize that I was setting myself up for a lot of potential legal ramifications and a lot of stress and angst over things like Draco's estate since he's a known Death Eater, and Harry's will etcetera, but I figure the groundwork on those issues will fill in the blanks by itself and you won't have to listen to me prattle on about politics and money for another seven chapters or so. SO glad you liked the bits with Tonks in them, she was surprisingly easy to write and a lovely change of pace since being an auror (I figure) is all about following orders and maintaining a basic structure – there's humanity, but not a ton of decision making. She does what she has to do and it works out for her in the end. She makes an appearance in this chapter actually, and reading your hopes and predictions for her I hope you're not too disappointed in what I actually did. About Purebloodism: When I was at a convention (some time in 2005, god this story is old) I was wandering around and saw an entire booth dedicated to selling "Republicans for Voldemort" bumper stickers, buttons, t-shirts etc. and I got seriously pissed off. Granted, the person I was with went gaga (found it hilarious in the way people find fart jokes hilarious) because she's extraordinarily Democrat and very liberal, whereas I would consider myself a liberal Republican and I really didn't think it was fair to cast my political party in such a shitty and fascist light. Okay true, a lot of Republican party representatives are very conservative on a lot of issues such as political correctness, border control, and gay marriage: with the exception of the political correctness comment I would consider myself fairly liberal on all points, while still maintaining a Republicanness that's pretty uncommon in people my age. So I dedicated a few solid hours to bitching out everybody that put Republicans in the "Conservative" house and wrote a segment on it. See what I meant about prattling on about politics? I could do it all day. I guess what I meant to say there was "I'm really glad you cottoned on to that particular idea" and I should probably leave it at that and move on. Yeah, I love Voldemort – not a fun fellow to work with, but absolutely a blast to write and one day I will probably post "Voldemort: A Working History of Pureblood Pride". Or not, that's obsessive even for me. Sorry, once you get me started on all the political stuff I tend not to shut up, just don't ever say "undocumented worker" or "gay marriage is an abomination" anywhere near me and you can avoid my going on all afternoon. :D. And finally, before this gets so long that someone gets pissy with me, Harry. He doesn't really show up in this chapter, well, no, he does show up in this chapter but its in a stationary, non-sentient way – a bit like dynamic furniture actually. I do want to explain more, about Harry, and Dumbledore, and Draco and the potential political problems that plague them (yay for alliterations) but I'll have to wait until after you've read this chapter and everything makes sense. Anyway – thanks so much (again) for the spectacular review, and at long last: Chapter 34 – your wish is my command.

P.S. Glad you liked the egg – Photo Editors are a beautiful thing.

* * *

Chapter 34 – Pray

Draco woke abruptly, faster than he had done in months. He had not experienced that brief moment of fuzziness where he wondered where he was and what had been done with his socks, he simply went instantly from deep unconsciousness to wary wakefulness without pausing to ask "Where am I?" His cell mate was sitting up and staring at him as he sucked in a breath, grateful for unhindered access to oxygen, and he didn't pause to wonder why it felt so wonderful simply to breathe, he knew. He did, however, wonder at the wisdom of placing two potentially violent and extremely dangerous criminals within mutilating distance of one another – it seemed so plebian, so very muggle. Christians and lions sprang to mind and he lifted an eyebrow, imagining if the guards hadn't been dementors how amused simple humans would be – roaring mob. There was no magic in this place – Draco felt its loss keenly, it made the air thinner, the light moved faster, there was an extraordinary emptiness somewhere in the region of his heart and he wondered vaguely if this was the thing that drove his father mad. And then it hit him, as though he hadn't realized it all along - he was in Azkaban.

He felt healthy, which was wrong somehow, but expected. It was a procedure, the prisoners were never thrown into a cell without having been given appropriate medical care for whatever the aurors had done to subdue them – and there were weekly magical scans done to ensure the health of the patients. Since the assumed death and subsequent escape of Bartimius Crouch Jr. the laws that governed the prison were followed to the letter, and it became that much harder to escape. Draco understood then that he knew too much about the inner workings of Azkaban, either though tales of former residents or simple visits to the prison itself, but it gave him the reassuring knowledge that whatever injuries he may have sustained were healed and he could assume that any latent effects of Voldemort's efforts to save himself would be non-harmful. He knew in the academic sense why, but the cynical side of him realized that he would be on trial before the Wizangamot for his involvement with the Dark Lord and subsequently put to death, so really, he wondered why they had bothered. "The Dark Lord…"

"Is dead." Draco hadn't asked, merely thought it aloud, the dark lord, Voldemort, the cause of all of this madness in his life and the hell he'd witnessed over the last year. And hadn't Peter Petigrew, with whom he happened to be sharing a cell, been helpfully informative – Dead. Voldemort was Dead – some things simply deserved the capital letters, and Draco smiled. He didn't question the statement, he could feel it, there was no longer a link between himself and the dark lord, there was no longer the nagging pain in the back of his mind when he tried to seek Voldemort out, it was simply him in his head with no dark and fiery strings attached.

"Where's Harry?"

"Potter's dead too." Said Petigrew, and Draco stared at him emptily. He had never gotten a particularly close look at the man, Wormtail had always been cowering in some corner or sniffling at the Dark Lord's robes, living up to his name and looking very much the part of the rat, so though Draco recognized him, he had never really seen the man before.

He wasn't terribly old, perhaps just a few years older than his own father, mid forties – his sandy hair was thinning out and he showed signs of having once been over weight – sagging skin that hung from his neck and chin in loose yellow flabs, that sort of grey tone that people who lived with too much stress or too little sleep was smeared under his eyes. He was normal, a once milquetoast little man that had fallen on hard times and did not carry stress well – with the exception of a raw looking stump of an arm the man was completely unremarkable in every way. In other circumstances Draco might have pitied him – or at least sneered. "He hates you."

"He's dead!"

Draco didn't quite laugh, and didn't quite snort, but there was still a tiny incredulous exhalation of breath, "I imagine he still hates you, one way or another." Draco ought to have been more upset, he felt like he should be crying, or screaming, or something because this wasn't the way it was supposed to happen. Somewhere along the line the narrative had gotten away from them, Draco had spent a good chunk of his childhood in books, he knew how stories went, and this was backwards. The childhood enemies didn't morph into grudging associates then friends then lovers only for one of them to die and the other to spend the rest of his natural life in prison, he was supposed to have died too and this was wrong. The hero of the piece didn't face impossible odds against villains of a foul nature only to die, uncelebrated in a fucking parking lot. Draco felt something like a sneeze building up behind his eyes, there were footsteps coming down the corridor, and Petigrew was looking somewhat frantic, repeating the phrase 'They're dead' over and over until it lost all meaning. Draco's voice cracked as he whispered, "I killed him."

"They're dead."

"I loved him."

"They're dead."

"I killed him."

"Quite the contrary mister Malfoy." The owner of the footsteps came into view and Draco didn't bother to look up – if Harry was dead then Draco had killed him, one way or another. By dragging him to the Dark Lord's side, by not finding another way of doing things, by approaching him in the first place – Harry Potter was dead, therefore Draco had killed him – the logic was infallible. "Harry Potter is not dead and in light of recent evidence that has been brought to my attention you are being released into my custody until things can be sorted out."

Draco looked up stunned and a little sick feeling, to see Professor Dumbledore peering at him through the bars on the door. He looked away to clear his head, and it made no more sense than it had earlier. "What?"

"Azkaban is hardly the place for a sixteen year old boy, wouldn't you agree?"

"Oh." The door swung open and Petigrew twitched into a corner, backing away from the wizard who shot him a look so full of contempt it could have peeled the paint from the walls had there been any paint. Draco didn't move from his spot until Dumbledore's hand touched his shoulder – he had been trying really, but he found his knees suddenly locked in place and the rest of him had no desire to shift from the spot until he could catch his breath again. He wasn't sure he'd heard correctly, and had no desire to have his potential misconception corrected – and it left him asking the question 'what if Harry were alive?' What then, because that had never truly been a contingency they'd counted on – something that he'd prayed for, and something that they'd let themselves talk about in a vague and laughing sort of way because they knew it couldn't happen, but the thought honestly scared him far more than Harry's being gone had. He didn't know what to think – he should have been happy, but he was just confused and sort of nauseous.

The magic and the air outside of Azkaban and away from the particular stench of that island was miraculous – it seemed that everything were real again, colors had depth, light was no longer watery and thin, there was magic in his heart but the blank space still remained, nagging at him and hurting. He didn't know what to think and finally voiced the question, "He's really not dead?"

"Not anymore, or yet – the permanence of his continued existence is up to him I suspect." Draco had never heard Dumbledore speak so candidly on a subject, and suspected that he'd been caught off guard, but Dumbledore continued almost maliciously, giving Draco the details he had not asked for and effectively breaking his heart. "It's been five hours since the Aurors sent to deal with the Death Eater gathering returned, since then the best St. Mungo's has to offer have spent their time attempting to make him whole again. As far as I know his heart has stopped twice and he's been brought back twice."

"As far as you know…" Draco repeated dumbly as Dumbledore handed him the shoe strings of some old boot and Draco didn't question the move, merely sat holding them. Granted, Petigrew may not have been particularly informed, but the seed of doubt had been planted in his mind and it raced up Draco's spine like hot needles 'as far as he knew'. Draco didn't want to return to freedom only to find Harry really dead, he didn't want to be jerked up and down like this – it hurt beyond reason, and there was one final thing he had to know. "Why?"

Dumbledore looked at him solemnly over half-moon spectacles and said "Portus."

The world flew away before Draco had the chance to prepare himself for another port-key trip, he emerged in Dumbledore's office in a heap on the floor, wedged between a chintz armchair that housed Hermione Granger and the hearth. Draco ignored the girl in the room in favor of the Headmaster, not bothering to get up, merely righting himself and sitting against the fireplace. "Why did you have me released?"

He didn't particularly care to know, but he was running on auto-pilot and it was in his nature to poke and prod at the inconsistencies of the world before he was satisfied with the answers it offered him. He didn't want to know any of this, whether Voldemort was dead or no was inconsequential, why Granger was sitting in the Headmaster's office was equally unimportant (unless she had become faculty against all precedent and then there would be words); what was important was getting his head screwed on straight, seeing Harry, and making sure he'd regret ever having dragged him into this – but Draco's brain had shut down somewhere back in Azkaban, and personal priorities meant little over information.

"That's what I would like to know!" Draco could just imagine her distress – one minute she'd been sitting with her pseudo family and the new baby, the next she was in Dumbledore's office being told that the incredible Harry Potter was dying and did she have any idea what that was about? Draco didn't sympathize at all, and he was secretly hoping that she bit her own tongue some time in the next five seconds. He decided that auto-pilot was a good thing indeed.

Dumbledore sighed and didn't bother going through his typical motions of summoning tea or offering biscuits, he merely got straight to the point, and Draco thought of him unkindly. The old man had been no help, had made the wrong decisions concerning both of them, had underestimated Harry and scorned him from their very first arrival on the Hogwarts steps. He had never truly helped either of them in any way, and Harry's resentment of the man had bled into Draco through a sort of osmosis that he didn't care to analyze. Draco was fairly sure on top of disliking the Headmaster immensely, he also loathed, resented, and admired the man for his sheer nerve.

"I had you released because I thought this interview would be more comfortable in familiar surroundings." Dumbledore said openly, "I've questioned Miss Granger exhaustively and can only conclude that she knew nothing of Harry's plan to kill the Dark Lord, Professor Snape, however, assures me that you do. Frankly Mister Malfoy, you are here because we want to know precisely what happened and how."

"I don't know how." Draco snapped impatiently, "I'll tell you everything you want to know about what we did – and the meeting, but I don't know how."

"I want something better." The headmaster said calmly in the face of Draco's ire, and it took a moment for Draco to realize what he meant, but things became clear as the headmaster stepped away from the cupboard in the back of his office bearing a pensieve. "I've asked Miss Granger here today to act as a witness."

Draco blanched. What Dumbledore was asking was for the grossest personal invasion available, he meant to rummage around inside Draco's memories by extracting them from his skull and living them all over again – and Draco's skin crawled. He didn't like the thought of anyone witnessing his moments of extreme weakness and pain, the extreme tiredness and irrationality that they'd both suffered, it went far beyond personal pride, Dumbledore was asking for every private moment on display and Draco squirmed. "I give you those memories, I get to see Harry." He said in his father's best deal making voice, and Dumbledore nodded.

* * *

Several loud explosions blasted the Ministry of Magic and Lieutenant Nymphadora Tonks had her wand drawn and a shield bubble cast around her squad before she realized it had not been an explosion, simply the result of several howlers and whines going off at once. It had been going on all afternoon. Frightened, incredulous, and just plain baffled witches and wizards across the country side had been sending very loud messages to the minister's mail box, which was overflowing with red howlers and green whiners from people that wanted verification of what they'd heard on the local news, or from their milkman, and people raging against the administration for not doing something sooner. It was hardly the ministry's fault – they hadn't anticipated this, they hadn't planned on suddenly being free of the burden of the Dark Lord, and now that they were the ministry had no idea what to do with itself – they were twirling in the wind without any way of knowing what to do next. So the major thorn in their sides was gone, the fear that had been lingering over people's heads had been completely eradicated, all known marked death eaters with the exception of six were abruptly dead. Three of those six living death eaters had been spies for either the ministry or the Order, the other three, Draco Malfoy, Vincent Crabbe, and Peter Petigrew had been rounded up and were pending trial, it was simply bizarre. There were no loose strings to be tied, no stragglers to be rounded up, for all intents and purposes the job was done and they could all go home, or get to work on instating a better foreign policy, or do whatever it was governments did when they weren't at war with dark wizards. 

Tonks didn't know and she didn't care – politics were not her cup of tea, she just chased down the bad guys and kicked back when she thought she could get away with it. Everyone knew Harry Potter was involved, it was inevitable – he seemed to be at the center of every Voldemort related incident in the last four years, but the press hadn't had anything official to report and Tonks wasn't about to change that. It was almost an unwritten rule that the police obstruct the press, the press nagged like particularly annoying mosquitos, using flash bulbs and shouting questions at the top of their lungs as she had entered the Ministry building and Tonks had taken the time to glare at each and every one of them to say "we'll tell you if we feel like it and not before." Which was precisely how things worked between them. They asked her questions about Harry, about how Voldemort had died, and exactly how and why Harry had been allowed to go face him, etcetera etcetera until most of them were blue in the face. Tonks said nothing, though that last question niggled in the back of her mind. Dumbledore, if he were any reasonable and responsible sort of man could have stopped Harry long before he'd popped into the area. It didn't matter – they would get the information sooner or later, and the less she said the less she could be incriminated. If she told them the whole truth as she saw it there would be two dozen different versions slapped across the morning papers and she refused to be responsible for that sort of rumor spreading and idiocy.

She didn't give it a whole lot of thought – she knew if she brought it up she would just become frustrated and the headmaster would become gracefully taciturn – he was really the ultimate politician – telling people things to placate them and they left calm feeling as though they had the answers and only realizing ten minutes after the fact that he hadn't said anything. The plain fact was that Harry was always involved and that could be the end of it. Rumor had it that every auror on the scene was going to be rewarded a Merlin, first class, for bringing down the dark lord in their time of need – but everyone knew it was more a bribe than a reward. We'll give you incredible status amongst the wizarding world providing you keep quiet about the fact that you didn't do anything. Tonks would accept the award and maybe she would consider Dumbledore's previous offer of becoming the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts and ending the 'curse'. Blirghty was apparently leaving at the end of the term having decided at the beginning of it that he would not be staying long – the excitement and stress of teaching was apparently too much for him – Tonks figured she would be okay after firmly schooling a score of fully grown wizards who thought they knew everything in ways of not dying.

That was what she would do – she'd accept her First Class Merlin, she would retire from auror-dom with a nice sum of gold in the bank account as part of her retirement pay out, she would accept a job at Hogwarts, and maybe she could even get self defense classes going the way they were meant to be taught. It would be just like old times, without the death, the mayhem, the terror, and the pain of losing someone every other week to death eater attacks – it sounded downright pleasant. Though her plans would have to wait for the moment, because shortly following the explosion of Howlers from the Minister's mailbox was the minister himself, trailing smoke and dashing across the lobby of the ministry muttering madly about his desk being on fire. "What the hell…?"

"I heard the stress was too much for him." Said a voice next to her, and Tonks didn't have to look to know that it was Kingsley Shacklebolt – the five commanding officers in the final 'battle' against Voldemort were standing together in a tight knot, two of them vigorously discussing the possibility of promotion. She knew it was Kingsley simply because it was always Kingsley, standing next to her with a comment regarding one thing or another – it was like having an imp in her pocket ready to make with a light hearted or sarcastic phrase for every occasion. "Merlin knows he's been under _so _much pressure these days, what with election season coming up."

Tonks snorted appreciatively and rolled her shoulders – they had been standing in the lobby for over an hour now with no particular reason, waiting for someone to call on them, a commanding officer to demand answers, or even a kindly person bearing the words "Go home!" She had a blinding headache, as anticipated, and it almost felt like a waste because while watching the proceedings very carefully had certainly been educational her role in the events in the empty lot had hardly been worth the migraine. "I don't see why – the things' over – all he has to do is smile, wave, and take credit for it."

"Apparently he's forgotten his calling in life." Kingsley said wryly, "I'm fairly sure his advisors just told him to retire."

Tonks shot the man a look of admiration, "Are you still using the extendable ears?"

Kingsley smirked, "Ah – yes, the minister, now that he's stopped muttering about the little bits of green fire, has just said that yes, an early retirement might be the best thing… the end of an era, that sort of thing, time for a breath of fresh air now that he's sorted things out… and no, no, Rufus Scrimegeour is far too stringent for the position, perhaps Mario Quimbley would be better suited for Minister in the up coming term."

Tonks laughed and clapped her hand over her mouth abruptly to prevent the sound from reaching too many people, "Quimbley?" She said incredulously, bordering on hilarity, "Seriously, he just suggested Quimbley?" A member of the wizengamot famous for his gentle manner of speech and excruciating slowness in reaching any decision – Tonks sometimes wondered how he dressed in the morning if it took him twenty minutes to pick a pair of socks. Quimbley would be… perfect. Kingsley only waggled his eyebrows in her direction, and removed the end of the extendable ears, momentarily turning them fleshy colored again. "Shacklebolt, you are a piece of work."

"That I am, that I am." They shared a brief moment of mutual entertainment as Kingsley rolled the extendable ear into a tight coil and tucked into his pocket. "Look, we're not needed here – what would you say to a drink?"

"Yeah, okay."

* * *

Marjorie had been in the hospital wing when they brought Harry in, she had been sitting with her son, her son. Her son, beautiful, purple, squalling thing and she had never been happier to have met Hermione – she had a son. She was completely and utterly exhausted but sufficiently recovered after several hours of sleep to hold him and she hadn't wanted to let go – every time she thought of her other options, adoption, abortion her heart seemed to lunge. She had a son. 

The mantra had been repeating in her head for what seemed like eternity, sharing a stupidly happy grin with Susan who had port-keyed in the moment she went into labor, and Hermione, who refused to leave 'no matter what stupid thing Harry is up to, because I belong right here.' She had been pacing nervously both before and after the birth of her baby, and Marjorie knew exactly why, but Hermione wasn't going to admit in a hundred years that she was worried until Marjorie finally kicked her out and sent her to find out what was going on. She loved Hermione dearly, but sometimes her stubbornness could be unbearable and right now was undoubtedly one of those times. Marjorie wasn't nearly as torn, she was content to wait with the rest of the world for the news that had Hermione pacing on a regular basis and they had joked that Hermione would have to become the first female Minister in order to get the hourly updates she craved. She was content to wait it out with Susan and the baby and they had a good time of it, talking in quiet tones about shared histories and things to call him. They had completely avoided the subject of their parents until Susan said quite boldly "Mom wants you home – she misses you and was worried about you."

"What does dad have to say?"

Susan looked at her sideways for a moment, pointed and delicate little features full of mischief until she broke into a broad grin, "He says, and I quote – you'd better name the kid after him, and that he'll see you on the hols."

"That's… that's… amazing." She said breathlessly with a grin that wavered severely until Susan started laughing at her. "You and Andrew must have worked on him a lot for that."

Susan's smile was fond, Andrew was her husband of five years though they had known one another since their days at Hogwarts, even their ordinarily stern and frighteningly protective father was enamored of him and had been known to be swayed by his stumbling but effective logic and his simple good-intentioned Andrewness. Susan picked at Andrew, Andrew picked at their father, and their father folded like a house of cards. "I think he promised you'd get all twelve Excellent N.E.W.Ts next year."

"Hey! No fair, hold the baby so I can hit you for him."

"You'd hit a woman with a baby?"

"That depends…" Marjorie asked archly as she handed over her son – her son! – to her sister, "Was the woman serious about calling the baby Reginald?"

"I think dad may have been joking. A little."

"I was thinking Thomas Michael – I know its plain, but if he turns out to be…." She dropped her voice to a terrified whisper "Squibby… I want him to fit in at Muggle school."

"Thomas…. I like it." They sat in silence watching the baby, he was asleep, curled against Susan's chest, small, delicate, and warm – he was a miracle and Marjorie could cry with happiness just seeing him. But Susan broke the silence before her hormones and love could completely overwhelm her, "Why's Hermione so distracted today?"

"Its… every year, she told me that every year Harry does something stupid – really stupid, and it usually to do with You-Know-Who and she's usually along for the ride but this year she's… not. She's worried."

"I was so jealous." Was the response, an apparent non-sequitur, "When mom owled me and told me you were starting your first year with Harry Potter I was so jealous – I thought it would be so exciting… he's the only person to ever defeat You-Know-Who. Or at least escape him… I was so jealous."

"Four and a half times, according to Hermione." Marjorie said evenly, having heard all the tales, gasped in the right places, and nearly hugged Ron when Hermione told her about the giant chess game. "He always seemed kind of boring to me. He just goes to class, and mopes a bit – he's pretty normal."

"Except for the stupid thing he supposedly does every year."

"Yeah, well if you ask me, going around with Draco Malfoy was the stupidest thing he could've done anyway."

And that was when the Hospital wing erupted into madness. The timing was ridiculous, like something you'd see in a muggle movie, and Majorie thought for just a brief and paranoid moment that she'd summoned the chaos and clapped a hand over her mouth, belatedly trying to take back the words.

They were in a fairly secluded corner of the hospital wing, completely away from the third year Care of Magical Creature's victims and the few students needing calming potions after preparing for their O.W.Ls and N.E.W.Ts, able to watch the proceedings as students tromped in and out of the hospital wing in search of pepper-up potion and bandages. Madam Pomfrey came storming in first, slamming open her door, followed quickly by two St. Mungoes paramedics, a floating stretcher, and the Headmaster as she snapped orders at them all. The stretcher was floated over to the nearest bed and the paramedics stepped in, transferring the still body with force instead of magic, lifting him and depositing him on the bed as Madam Pomfrey spat a series of charms as though they were curses and a green ball appeared, floating over the bare headboard. "Is that…" Susan was whispering into her ear, having joined her on the bed, and Thomas was cradled protectively in her arms, it was a miracle he hadn't woken up.

"Oh god… Harry." Was Marjorie's answer, and they watched in stunned horror as the green ball above Harry's head slipped from green to yellow to red in a matter of seconds and Madam Pomfrey really did start cursing then as she snapped for Albus, not the Headmaster, nor Professor Dumbledore, to begin a respiratory spell. The paramedics were standing back well out of the way, and it was the best thing they could have done as the medi-witch chanted healing spells as though they were her native tongue, and maybe they were. In the downtime between contractions Madam Pomfrey had told Marjorie all about how she was from a line of Medi-witches and wizards and how she'd been trained in the field, sent directly to hospitals to learn when she'd graduated – Marjorie couldn't imagine why that conversation was filtering back into her mind as she watched Harry Potter die. The glowing ball darkened farther to black, Susan began to cry at her shoulder and for a moment Marjorie wondered if this wasn't how Hermione felt, distant and analytical while the people around her cried – Harry Potter was dead.

* * *

Draco had gotten his memories back yesterday, they hadn't been out of his head long and true to his word Dumbledore had someone escort him directly to Harry's bedside as soon as the wand left his hand. It was procedure – Draco had to be a completely willing participant in the process of removing his memories or Dumbledore would have been in strict violation of a number of laws and Wizard's rights – that sort of thing may have been acceptable twenty years ago, but now it would have the old man thrown in prison. So Draco had done it himself, pressed the wand to his temple and dragged out thick goopey strings of memory and dropped them in the pensive one by one. He left nothing out for fear of recrimination, and because embarrassment no longer held meaning – Draco wasn't sure whether this would help Harry's recovery or not, probably not, and in the hours his memories were away he wasn't entirely sure why he should need to speed that process at all, only that it was vital to do so. Some time after he'd been unceremoniously dropped in a chair in the hospital wing of Hogwarts a nameless, unimportant woman entered the room carrying the stone basin in which his thoughts were held, Draco didn't pay too much attention. 

"We've created memory orbs from what you've given us." She said immediately and Draco nodded as though he cared, "They may or may not be used in trial against you – obviously the memories will have to be examined further before we reach a decision, but the current vote is in your favor…" the woman was obviously not used to talking to such completely disinterested parties, Harry was unconscious, Draco was unresponsive, she pressed on valiantly. "Professor Dumbledore asked that I inform you… he has chosen to 'judiciously edit' some of the more choice memories, he said they were for your eyes only." And she finally got the response she had been waiting for.

Draco looked up fuzzily from where he had been staring at a place on Harry's arm – the Gryffindor had bitten through the skin on the inside of his wrist, and Draco couldn't remember where that was from – wanted to. "Thank you." He said quietly, and gently accepted the pensive from the auror as she tentatively pressed his wand into his hand. He wasn't interested in being difficult, though she was clearly expecting enemy action of some kind – but he simply touched his wand to the puddle of swirling liquid then to his forehead until all of his memories had returned to him and he knew again why Harry couldn't die, but it didn't help. Everything was back, vivid and fresh in his newly-returned memories, and Draco felt himself losing control, all the frustration, the emotional and physical pain, the sheer difficulty and pigheadedness they had both demonstrated and it hurt so much. He could still remember how he felt when his mother died, that cold sort of dread, and he still remembered his ankle cracking apart against a statue as he thrashed in agony – it was all there, and Draco started to cry. Solitary tears winding their way down his face in cold rivers of salt water until the auror left him in peace, having once again confiscated his wand and taken the pensive. What he saw when Harry stopped eating and sleeping for weeks at a time, what he felt in himself the stress and the fucking exhaustion until he was so tired he couldn't sleep, couldn't speak, could hardly breathe – it was all fresh in his memory, the friends he had abandoned, the family that had fallen apart, and the excruciating pain he felt every time the Dark lord picked through his mind, like hot rusty nails across his cerebral cortex, and he started to cry in earnest. Doubled over Harry's knee and sobbing like some pathetic school girl until he had managed to cry himself out and fell asleep with his head pillowed against the threadbare hospital mattress.

When Draco woke, Madam Pomfrey was running her hourly checkup on Harry and she set a sandwich less than a foot away from Draco's hand, asking that he eat something. Several hours later the sandwich was still there, and she threatened to cram it down his throat should he not be appreciative and eat it. When he was not, however, crying himself out like a little girl and being threatened by a diminutive nurse, he asked the aurors for their news papers, read them aloud to Harry and caught up on his recent events. The Minister of Magic had retired officially, no longer would they see the trademark green bowler in the papers, Draco laughed for the first time in days and some part of him buried deeply under self control and exhaustion crowed in glee – he had never approved of Cornelius Fudge.

Draco had asked only once what injuries Harry had sustained, how he was doing, and when he was expected to wake up – the nurse told him point blank that Harry was lucky to be alive and the ordinary human body couldn't survive the stress that his had been through. She seemed to blame him, and he couldn't blame her, so she had never asked again. The aurors had come in once more to inform him that they had been discussing the collapse of the Death Eaters with their spies within the order and Vincent Crabbe, who had miraculously enough survived. Draco didn't understand, and didn't bother to ask – they would tell him when they were ready to reach the point. Fortunately the point arrived fairly soon – only those death eaters disloyal to Voldemort had survived the curse, and though they weren't entirely sure what had happened to cause such a terrible domino effect, the theory that non-supporters survived was a sound one. Draco thought of Peter Petigrew, thought of the rat-like man chanting in his cell and wondered who he had meant by 'they', more specifically, who are they that are dead? There were the Potters, obviously, and Black, but then he could have been thinking of the Death Eaters, Voldemort in particular, and Petigrew had never been loyal to anyone in his life. He followed the most powerful master, but loyalty and survival instincts were not the same thing – Draco hated to think that a rat bastard like Petigrew escaped his fate on a mere technicality.

The aurors later stopped by to inform him that because he had visibly cast the killing curse, if Harry did in fact die as the direct results of last Tuesday night, Draco would be tossed into Azkaban and the key would be thrown away. Madam Pomfrey insured that he fed himself at least because he watched her raptly every time she was in the room, any time she had a chance of healing Harry or making his life easier in any way he watched her, and he watched her for the opposite as well. On the fifth night he gave up on sleeping in the chair and stretched out beside Harry like he had on those occasions that Harry had fallen asleep in a comfortable place, and he drifted off to sleep.

Dumbledore had stopped by to be met by their joint icy reception, and the old man seemed to take pity on him, conjuring up a chair on the other side of Harry's bed and attempting to make small talk. Draco was sure he smelled bad, and simply didn't care – it wasn't as though they allowed him a wand and he wasn't leaving the hospital wing to shower. Madam Pomfrey had told him that it often helped comatose patients to recover if they had familiar voices around them, people that would talk to him, so Draco had talked constantly until his voice grew hoarse and died, but he still wouldn't leave for anything. Harry was really all he had left, his mother had killed herself, his father was dead in the backlash as was the remainder of his family including his aunts and uncles. Harry was the only one that still had a heart beat, and Draco wasn't nearly as cold as he liked to pretend. The headmaster summoned two cups of tea and simply sat with him for a while before making his reasons for being there known. Draco didn't drink the tea. "Has there been any change?"

In the very early hours of his being here Harry's heart had stopped again, Draco sent for Madam Pomfrey in a panic when a loud red alarm went off above his bed and prayed that the monitors had screwed it up. It happened occasionally, a patient would awaken and move out of the bed before any hospital staff took notice and the alarms went off, or the magic would simply wear away over time and the alarms would sound for the spell to be refreshed, but that had not been the case and Draco stood pacing and panicking as a revival team made up of Madam Pomfrey and two hitwizards in medical training restarted his heart and his breathing, sighing deeply in relief when the monitors turned back to green and Madam Pomfrey sat down heavily on the bed next to Harry's. She looked up at him slowly after he'd calmed down and threatened to give Harry the thumping of his life if he ever did something so pig headed as dying again and she said "We're losing him, that's the third time since he was brought into us." Draco shook his head and begged her to make it better, so she patted him on the shoulder and left him in peace with a cup of hot chocolate that he didn't drink.

"No, there hasn't been any change."

Dumbledore leaned forward conspiratorially, and Draco hunched over uncomfortably, not wanting to hear it but physically unable to ignore what the headmaster was about to say. Dumbledore cast as spell over the general populous, all eyes were drawn to him, it was impossible to ignore him, to simply be what he had been in the two days previously – frozen, watching, waiting, he hated Dumbledore for taking that away, even for a moment, but he simply couldn't ignore the man. Sometimes he wondered if he did cast a spell, charisma could only carry a person so far before things started to look suspicious, but Draco suspected he blended his natural doddering charm with magic so subtly that everyone saw something strange in the headmaster of Hogwarts and didn't realize it until it was far too late.

"I've been reviewing your memories and I think it would be prudent to discuss this with you before any decisions are made." Draco blinked at him lazily, "As you know Harry is now a ward of the state…"

"What is it you want?"

"Frankly Mister Malfoy, should Harry Potter choose to wake up, we're not sure who he'll wake up as." Draco was suddenly very cold, and suddenly very interested in listening, "The Magic you two performed was extremely dangerous and the combination of binding spells you used to adjust the poison you used on Voldemort may well have had side effects – there was a link, did you not realize, a connection between Harry and the Dark Lord." Of course he knew it, he had been there for the nightmares, and the few occasions Harry had clawed into his own temples trying to escape the burning in his head – he was most definitely aware of a link between them and said so.

"Circumstances as they are, we're not sure, should he regain consciousness, that he'll be our Harry, Voldemort, or some combination of the two." Dumbledore finished bluntly, fixing him with a pointed look that suggested everything had been his fault, and it probably was. "It has been suggested to me that we… end the debate by eliminating its source."

Draco Malfoy suddenly and passionately hated Dumbledore with everything he had – they had given everything to the man's cause only to be reduced to 'sources of debate', and the coldness that had been in him had vanished. A beaker full of some seething purple liquid shattered and Draco stood, "No."

"Mister Malfoy…" Dumbledore said quite calmly in the face of the wandless magic, "Should the dark lord return, Harry's sacrifice will have been in vain." Draco hated people that used words like 'sacrifice' when they'd never made them, he hated soft old men talking about their unfortunate pawns as though they were simultaneously heroes and easily discarded pieces of cardboard, the suggestion made him sick.

"Harry's spent months telling me how he doesn't trust you, and how when he lets himself think, he hates you and I didn't really understand it until now." Draco was a little shell shocked by the whole thing, the headmaster's blatant disregard for Harry's actual life, and the sudden fury that left him completely numb to the repercussions of anything he said. "Harry will reach the age of majority in four months, you know as well as I do that the ministry is wholly unconcerned with cases so near the subject's adulthood – you're only using this as an excuse to get rid of him. But regardless of how jealous you are, or how terrified you are of his potential, Harry deserves a chance." He was speaking from personal experience, as an orphan now, and drawing on all the Malfoy haughtiness that he could, staring the headmaster down with stiff shoulders and a firm gaze. He was shooting from the hip, knowing that he and Harry Potter were completely different scenarios in the eyes of the magic government, Potter would be closely monitored, Malfoy could hang. No, this was something else entirely, this was Dumbledore too afraid of potential consequences to deal with them and looking for the easiest escape route. "Besides which, it's been made clear to me that if Harry dies here I will be spending the rest of my natural days in Azkaban, something I am adverse to, no matter the circumstances."

"You should have thought of that before you cast the killing curse!"

"It worked didn't it!" It was the first time Draco had ever seen Dumbledore lose his cool or control of his voice and he couldn't help but respond in kind. "Voldemort's dead, so obviously we did something right, which is more than I can say for you!"

"But you must consider the possibility that…"

"If he's not Harry when he wakes up I'll kill him myself, but you're not going to _murder_ him just because it's easier!" Another beaker smashed, this time with blue liquid inside.

Dumbledore nodded gently and resumed his seat in the chair next to Harry's bed, the energy seemed to leave him as he watched Harry breathe slowly, in and out, laboriously. "I never meant for this to happen to him." It wasn't an apology, but that was probably as close as either of them would ever get. "And… if I bothered to listen to Rufus Scrimegeour now I'd never live it down."

"Molly Weasley would have your guts for garters." Draco said with a grin, because he knew intimately how protective she was. He couldn't recall exactly when, a few days ago, she had come by Hogwarts under the pretense of visiting her daughter and had detoured to the hospital wing strictly to visit Harry, brushing back his hair, casting charms across the floor and fussing until she spotted him. Draco had watched her as he watched everyone else, completely mystified by how she'd missed him on her first and second sweep across the room. She shot him a glare then gave him a crushing hug, and they'd talked for an hour about the most inconsequential things, things he could never imagine a Malfoy discussing with a Weasley, but he wasn't exactly a Malfoy anymore so maybe that was all right. Draco suspected that the woman needed someone to talk to, and he had been a very convenient pair of ears conveniently attached to Harry Potter, who she loved like one of her many sons.

"She would at that."

Dumbledore stood, old bones creaking and Draco watched him carefully, ready for him to spin around and cast the killing curse or do something other than stand and leave the room. The headmaster never seemed to open the door, he just slowly faded into the lining of the room until he wasn't there anymore, but before he went, Draco said "The Slytherins. Not all of them were marked, but some of them might be stupid enough to try something."

The headmaster nodded and disappeared completely and Draco let himself sag in relief, sliding back into his vigil. After a time he collapsed onto the bed beside Harry, stretching out fully and comfortably for the first time in days. If Harry woke up as something other than himself… well Draco had employed the killing curse before, and he could do it again.

* * *

"Draco!" Pansy Parkinson had been walking down the hall somewhat lost in thought when the completely unexpected jumped out at her. Draco Malfoy, rounding the corner grimy and tired carrying a half eaten piece of toast and looking like death, and he didn't stop to reprimand the girl when she threw herself into him, hugging tightly and burying her face in his shoulder. "Draco! Oh god Draco! Where have you been?" 

"Oh… hello." The last standing Malfoy rocked back on his heels, confused and then realization dawned slowly who was talking to him and why she might care. It had been so long since he'd thought of any of this friends in Slytherin, or remembered that he had friends at all that it took him several moments to process this new realization of old information. "I've been in the hospital wing."

"You look terrible – you should still be there, what happened, is everything okay?"

"Pomfrey said… she kicked me out, said she wouldn't let me back in unless I ate something." The statement seemed completely out of context in this conversation, but it was true enough. The formidable nurse had bodily thrown him from the hospital wing because she didn't have the time to stand over him as he force fed himself and she wasn't going to watch another of her students do this to themselves. She informed him in no uncertain terms that Harry's malnutrition was contributing to his continued unconsciousness and Draco was being a burden on her and the entire staff. Draco liked Madam Pomfrey, she was a no-nonsense sort of woman and he hated her for being right – but then, medi-witches usually were.

"The… Draco we all thought you were dead!" Pansy's delicate fingers balled themselves into the fabric of his robes, pulling it taut against his shoulders and he couldn't remember why that would be important. She was biting her lip nervously, which he recognized, "We thought you were dead. Goyle… and Blaise … and everyone else is! Except Crabbe and you know he was always more on your side than anything else… but everyone else is dead and you didn't tell us! You didn't tell us anything!" Pansy had always cried prettily, tears seeping out of dark eyes and making her eyelashes fall in dramatic clumps as she blinked up at him, but this was earnest and sad as she clung to him, sobbing into his robe. He patted her awkwardly on the shoulder, smearing a bit of butter in the curly ends of her hair and he remembered what it was like before his mother's suicide.

"I'm sorry…" It was inadequate, words tended to fail him in these situations, and he had always understood that. He never had any intention of any of this, he had just wanted out, he didn't care what happened to the world or anyone in it, but suddenly friends and family from all over the world were dead and he didn't care, didn't realize until now exactly what they had done. Stopped Voldemort, stopped a war – killed hundreds of people. "I'm so sorry, Pansy."

"I heard about you and Potter," Pansy said somewhere from the vicinity of his armpit, ashy blonde hair rustling with the movement of her muffled cries. Draco had grown, and hadn't realized it, because his only reference point had been Harry, who grew with him. "Was he worth it?"

"I think so… I think I understand now." Draco held her tighter, ignoring the toast and her pained cries, simply going on the fact that she needed a hug, because he did understand. Pansy was just a person, just a normal witch without any particular political affiliations simply following the ebb and flow of her families' preferences and going on with her life, and he'd managed to hurt her somehow, by having nothing to do with her he had managed to ruin things for her. Draco's heart thumped painfully and she must have heard it as close as she was, but didn't let go of him. He understood, finally, maybe, that everything Harry did affected someone else – they had killed Voldemort because they'd wanted out, not because they wanted someone dead, and Draco finally understood about desperation versus vendetta. None of their actions had been philanthropic, and that was the only way it could have been all right. "It was worth it."

"Blaise…" Pansy said, and her voice cracked horribly. It would have been wrong to ask that they could remain friends, though they would, because Draco was the only familiar thing in Pansy's life, and he owed it to her to hold on as tightly as he could. "We were going to be married."

* * *

After the meeting with Dumbledore, and as soon as the headmaster declared Harry fit for an audience despite his unconsciousness, Hermione Granger paid a visit. Sometime in the swirls and dips of time that marked the day, intent on sitting with Harry for a while, enjoying his company or what could be made of it. Draco didn't count as company, he was now part of the furniture. She picked up his right hand and held it gently, muttering into Harry's fingertips, and Draco watched her carefully, silent for once because his voice had long since abandoned him. She was crying, he realized, and vaguely wondered why, and he knew it was cruel but couldn't bring himself to care. She hadn't been around, and really didn't have the right, he thought – but then, according to him no one did. Eventually Hermione looked back at him after half an hour of careful scrutiny. "Happy now that you've finally killed him?" 

Draco looked up, startled by the girl's vehemence and her suddenly red rimmed eyes, and he didn't care. "Shut it you fucking filthy mudblood cow." And if someone had been there to tell him to watch his language he would have told them to fuck off too, but Hermione had simply done as told and shut her mouth. Draco let the silence continue on for several long minutes, ignoring her as she ignored him, and he hated her every time she brushed his hair back and ran her fingers across his hated scar. There was a scar closer to Harry's shoulder that Draco enjoyed much more and not for the first time he wondered how the hell they'd gotten here. Time dragged on slowly and the stroking across his scar continued until with every pass Draco's hands clenched tighter and his teeth began to grind against each other unconsciously. "Is that all he is to you?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Yes, you really are."

Hermione looked affronted, then confused, and she said "I had no idea. All this time, I thought he'd snapped and he was…" She fell silent for a moment, staring into the distance and picking up Harry's right hand in both of hers. Harry had never been particularly large, but her hands were still dwarfed by his. It occurred to him briefly that puberty had hit Harry rather hard, when he spoke his voice boomed and cracked on notes that accompanied the adolescent change and he hadn't noticed until now. Malfoy's didn't suffer such plebian afflictions, their voices slid from boyish and light slowly into the deeper baritones of grown men, and Draco had never suffered the sheer embarrassment of being so out of control, but he suspected that Harry hadn't noticed it anyhow. The entire concept was so… strangely inconsequential, completely out of order that his body should be changing and shifting about on him when he has other things to deal with, and how normal students would be bothered that their arms seem disproportionately long and their limbs connected only by rubber bands. But Harry had always been small, and length had added a gaunt sickliness to him that only made him more the tragic hero. Draco snickered and Hermione looked up from her study of his palm. "Why did you do it?"

Draco stared at her for a long while, trying to determine what she wanted, and when she started to squirm he answered her, "You saw the memories? You know what happened?" Hermione nodded silently, and Malfoy stared at her longer, waiting for something, verbal conformation, something in her eyes, or maybe just the energy to explain himself. "Could you have let that go on?"

"No." That was all the answer Draco needed. He had cast the killing curse because it was absolutely necessary to end Harry's pain, and that it hadn't killed them both could only be a benefit. Draco still didn't understand exactly why they were both alive, but he hadn't questioned it, and didn't care – the only important thing was making sure that Harry Potter woke up as Harry Potter and no one else, because in the end, Harry was his and that was infinitely important. "I heard a rumor."

"What's that?" Draco was feeling something of his old self again, difficult as he could possibly manage to Hermione, and it felt good. Harry had spent so much of his time avoiding her that Draco felt perfectly natural dragging out her discomfort to appease a certain vindictiveness in him. He had never liked Granger, and now he simply had more reason beyond her sheer know-it-all-ness and muggle-born status – the girl was fickle, not friends with anyone specifically simply close allies, and she had done her solemn best to guilt and snare Harry with carefully pointed barbs designed to drag him back to what she called reason. Reason was dying blindly with snooty opinions and some ridiculous equivalent of pride – but still dying for no purpose, having accomplished nothing, and none of that seemed reasonable to him. Draco raised a curious eyebrow in her direction and grinned wolfishly as she blushed, as though sharing a joke, and when Harry woke up he would have to remember this feeling.

"I heard that you and Harry were sleeping together."

"Sleeping? Not at the moment."

"Boyfriends I mean." It was brave of her to say, but Draco didn't give her the credit.

"That is possibly the most grossly inadequate term I have ever heard."

"Malfoy…" It had been a long time since he'd experienced that particular warning growl, and it was usually from Harry, and then quite unexpectedly Hermione started to laugh. "You really are a bastard aren't you?" Malfoy shrugged, completely unsure of how to answer that, but Hermione left it alone. She didn't stay after that, only long enough to collect her book, kiss Harry on his still forehead, and tie on the shoes she'd removed during a period of long silence. Hermione turned as she left and returned one of the stares Malfoy had been giving her all afternoon, "Thank you."

Two days later an auror dropped by with his wand, she looked a bit awkward and Draco thought he recognized her in a vague sort of way. She introduced herself as Nymphadora Tonks, and gave him his wand back – they had done a thorough history of it, dissected every spell, and given Harry's current stable condition had decided to return it on the condition that should he ever choose to act as a spy again he inform someone of authority. Draco hadn't questioned it, and suspected that someone had very quietly dropped a word in the newly-appointed Minister's ear on his behalf – he couldn't imagine who would have or why, but he wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Having the wand back in his hand felt like home, despite the things he'd done with it, having magic in his grasp once again made things feel real, and he didn't realize how much he'd missed it.

The woman stopped to chat for only a moment, filling him in on the gossip from the ministry and letting him in on a few of the secrets surrounding his suddenly non-pending trial. The case had been completely released, buried under an avalanche of Ministry paperwork – Harry Potter was alive, Voldemort was dead, and the litigation concerning the people that had caused it was swept under the carpet. People had needed a miracle, they had gotten one – the new minister had understood that dragging the entire extended fiasco on stage before a wizengamot would be a bad idea, and so it wouldn't happen, he was free. Free. It wasn't a word that had occurred to him before, freedom was not particularly high on his priorities, though it had been at some point – freedom to make his own decisions and have a future – the ministry would be keeping an eye out, but he was free. Free. For a moment Draco couldn't breathe, and so he used his newly returned wand to cast a cheering charm on everyone in the room, because it was trivial and easy and simply because he could. The auror he didn't quite recognize started to giggle, Draco joined her, and Harry started to snore, which startled them both. Draco laughed.

"Take care of him, cousin." Said Tonks as she leaned over and gave Harry a quick hug. Then shooting a conspiratorial wink at Draco she left him to his devices, absurdly happy because Harry had begun to snore and mutter in his sleep, which was more than he'd done before, and when he told Madam Pomfrey she smiled so brightly it lit up the room.

* * *

There was blackness, and burning, and they were what made up his world. There was him – but he was inconsequential, and did not recall why it should matter that he be here. And there was the other one that lingered here with him, and he was a part of the fire that lit the place with cerulean swirls of pain. They fought, or they argued, or they were simply two things that knew each other very well, like the opposite ends of a magnet, and they were always trying to become one another but could never quite manage it. They were not men. The fire ate into him, scorched him to his very soul, whatever that was, and he was dragged away by the other, and he pushed himself back into the fire, and into the pain, because that was what he had known first in this place, and what he had always known. Wherever this was, whatever this was, the only way of surviving was pain. 

He fought for it, in the same way a drowning man fights for air, though he knows it's futile. He had no knowledge of how he came to know these things, or imagine these things, or even what drowning meant, but he knew the fight, and the fire. He raged towards the brightness, and the light, and the burning, and he fought his brother in this place with everything he had, being pushed back time and time again as the other strove towards the blackness. It was cold in the shadows, soothing away the burn and the fire, it was dark, and terrifying, and he fought against it's pull, fought against the other shoving to get there – and he thought if only this place were a bit wider we could slip past one another and be where we want to be – but the concept of width had no meaning either and so they battled. The tides of the war swept back and forth, a constant rocking push and pull of pain and darkness, and as he fell back into the darkness the boy known as Harry began to breathe.

* * *

See, interesting symmetry – toldja he'd die. 


	35. Heaven: Or the Equivalent of a Happy End

**Disclaimer:** This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended

**Author's Notes: **It's been a long and crazy road hasn't it? Can you believe this all started out as an exercise in killing Cho Chang and not using dialogue? Three years, thirty five chapters, and about seven million chocolate bars later we've finally reached the end of the story. Thank you all for reading.

**Special thanks to:**

**Intelligent Designer: **Are you kidding? That wasn't negative at all (you should've seen the first review I got for "Only Natural" … now _that _was a negative review), to be honest I appreciate a little criticism, it shows that people are paying attention. I'm surprised I haven't had more complaints like "This doesn't make sense" or "I had to read this seven times, you suck." Hell, there are some bits and pieces that don't make sense to me until I read through them again and I wrote the bloody thing. This chapter, I fear, may be much the same, it's a little fragmented, but with any luck the important bits will come through. More Dumbledore in this chapter… and writing it I felt so guilty, like I was somehow smacking him with a rubber ducky or something equally absurd – I don't let him have any fun in this story, but I'm happy you liked the result. Here's the final chapter for you, it's probably predictable, but thanks for reading anyway.

**PaddycakePadfoot: **Harry died about three times I think, and I'm just going to grin magnanimously because I have never had so much fun with posting chapters. I have to admit, though you've probably figured this out, that I have a total thing for Draco and I did the whole dopey smile thing when you called him a sweetie – I think if I knew him I'd just wander around calling him a complete dork in the affectionate voice, so it's probably a good thing I don't know him because he'd hex me after an hour. I'm so glad you recognized Hermione's jerkishness for the plot device it really was – the whole thing really, Cho dying, Roger killing himself, Narcissa killing herself, Ron dying, Hermione going completely batshit over Marjorie, hell, Marjorie herself – all devices to get Harry and Draco in bed with one another – figuratively then literally. Seriously, I created an entire pregnant person with siblings, parents, memories, and food preferences just to distract Hermione – and you, being my most perceptive reader, spotted it. I dance the dance of glee – there is true joy in my heart. Hermione's not a bad sort though, except for maybe Voldemort nobody in this story really was, which is one thing I have always loved about Harry Potter – even Snape, though he's a mean old bastard is a good guy (sort of. Maybe. If we don't acknowledge the end of Half Blood Prince and even then I'm not convinced that he's a bad fellow). I don't really know what else to say – once again you've pretty much summed it all up for me. I could leave you hanging, drop a suggestion in your ear about how Marjorie's Baby (not at all like Rosemary's Baby, though there is a certain parody in there now that I think of it) is named Thomas (though it would be TMDurham as opposed to TMRiddle) and could (hypothetically) be possessed and grow up with the consciousness of Voldemort since Harry was still having a mystical mind melee when he was brought into the hospital wing… he could therefore become the next dark lord at 5 years old and no one would suspect… but I'm not a complete monster, and there's happy endings ahoy. :D Thanks again, so very much and I don't know how to say it any more sincerely without sounding trite, for sticking with me.

**Jillian: **Oh Harry, you think he'd follow the aphorism (cliché maybe) "Third Time's the Charm" but well… he's Harry. Can you imagine how embarrassing it would be for everybody (particularly Hogwarts) if everybody suspected Harry of being a Death Eater then he died trying to kill Voldemort just because they couldn't pull their heads out of their bums…? I'd work extra hard (with toast!) to start his heart again, so Yay Madam Pomfrey and Yay You for being the extra incentive I needed to post on this fine (extremely early) Sunday morning. Thank you for being coherent enough to review, and thanks (as always) for reading.

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Chapter 35 – Heaven: Or the Equivalent of a Happy Ending

"That's twice this week I've seen you Harry." Someone tsked at his right shoulder and Harry's eyes opened to a dim sort of haze surrounding his best friend. He was looking just over Harry, and Harry wondered what at until he said, "As enlightening as our little chat was last time, I don't think it's time for a second."

"Ron?"

Ron Weasley shrugged as though to say 'you were expecting Madonna?' but Harry knew without a shadow of a doubt that Ron would never call himself Madonna, Cher, Whitney, or any other muggle diva. Neither, for that matter, would Harry think of those names, and he vaguely wondered where these thoughts were coming from. There was brief pause where Harry met his friend's blue eyes, noting that they were silver, and brown, and a bit green, "Merlin Harry, tell me I wasn't so bloody soppy over Hermione and I'll promise not to come back and haunt you for shagging Draco Malfoy."

Harry felt vaguely uncomfortable trying not to focus on his eyes, trying to explain himself, but all that emerged was, "So… you don't mind then?"

Ron shrugged again, "Dead mate," Harry remembered, "Not allowed to say."

"I wish you weren't." Said Harry, and though the words were coming from his mouth he couldn't think were he had got them, Ron was sitting right here, clearly not as dead as prior sources of information would have it. "I miss you. Hermione too."

"She'll be fine mate." Ron didn't like to dwell, and just as Harry was opening his mouth to say "I wish you were a ghost" Ron cut in over him. "You should know, that was the bloody stupidest, most pig-headed, Gryffindor thing you've ever done. And I think you should apologize to Ginny – she really had her hopes up."

"Sorry Ron..." Harry shuffled uncomfortably somewhere around his best friend's feet, trying to hide himself among the clouds, "She's just… like kissing your sister – like kissing my sister – she's really not my type Ron." Last time they spoke, he knew it was about something important, something flittering around the confines of his memory, inaccessible and golden like the last snidget – today Harry wanted to remember.

"Obviously. My favorite couch Harry?"

Harry laughed in that distant and friendly way and it seemed to echo across the world before Ron heard it, "You pervy voyeur…"

"Not if I can help it!" An awkward pause, Ron was looking over his shoulder again into the whiteness, "Look, I'm not supposed to… what I've really been sent to say was: Stop blaming yourself for everything you silly ponce… Oh bugger."

The world surged and shot pain through his shoulders, there was pounding like lighting and for one brief second Harry thought he knew where his scar had come from. Pain, pain and power and someone yelling in the dark. Ron disappeared with a pop and Harry smiled vaguely, missing him more than ever before falling back into the silence of sleep.

* * *

Hagrid was sniffling loudly on the bare edges of consciousness. They were large, wet, robust sniffles just like the man himself, and though Harry's eyes were open wide he could barely see the outline of light and darkness that defined the human. "If I'm dead" he managed idly in his thoughts, "why haven't I seen my mum and dad yet?" There was horrible pressure on his left hand, Harry tried to protest the unfairness of it all, Hagrid instead of his parents, but all that emerged was "Nngh." And he slid back into unconsciousness.

* * *

There was heaviness on both of his hands, warm wetness on his right, and the steady pressure threatening to crush his left. Hermione was crying, holding his right hand to her mouth like a lover or a worried mother might, crying. Harry thought this was particularly unfair, he should be crying, his hands hurt, he should be the one crying, what had she done to deserve it? "Hrmine?" He said vaguely and coughed against the word, Hermione's eyes shot towards his, brown, and worried, and full of tears. Harry realized he could see colors again, and wondered when he couldn't and why he hadn't noticed it then.

"Oh Harry!" She said, and the pressure on his hands increased unbearably, the left one cool and dry, and hard, the right one wet and painful and covered in tears. "I'm sorry… I'm so sorry, I should have listened I should have…"

"Bggr 'ff." Said Harry, and it was for her own good.

* * *

The exhilaration, the heart pounding excitement of rising, rising, spiraling towards white clouds, that incredible chasing him with cold tendrils of mist that couldn't touch the heat that raced through them and… the barrier of the universe as he fell. The sudden jerking on the back of the broom that brought his exuberant flight to a break-neck halt. Falling, falling, clouds slipping away above him, their efforts to catch their brethren as futile as they had been on the way up, he was falling falling. Until he wasn't falling anymore and with a crash Harry Potter was back on earth. There was pain, emotion, and all of those deadly things that marked a body, that terrible ache between the eyebrows that inexorably labeled the wearer 'human'. He was awake.

Harry opened his eyes to the bleary familiarity of the white-white Hospital Wing. How many times had he lain in one of these beds, how many times had he woken up to the sheer curtains blowing pale webs from the windows in this purely white observatory. The weight on his left hand was just that, a weight, nothing more sinister, infinitely more comfortable than the crushing vice it had been, Harry didn't turn to look. "I was wondering…" came the reedy voice from just below his knee, "when I would have the chance to speak with you away from your stalwart guardian." Sirius, his parents? Surely his deed of ownership hadn't been transferred to Lupin in his mental absence. "I would like to ask you a few questions Mister Potter."

Harry opened his mouth to say something absolutely foul, and when nothing of the sort was willing to come out, he settled instead for "However I can be of service Headmaster" in his most scathing tone – which at the moment was not very scathing. He'd been conscious a few times before, in varied places with varied people, he had thought of better scenarios to wake up to. Again he'd opened his mouth to tell the Headmaster that fact in excruciating detail, but the words would not emerge.

Some of the twinkle in Dumbledore's eyes had slowly melted out to settle in his beard and take up residence on the toes of his boots, the Headmaster was not looking particularly amused. If anything he looked haggard, and Harry wondered why. "Mister Potter, I would like to ask you how you defeated the Dark Lord."

Harry told him his version of it, and told him that he didn't know how he'd done it, and told him that he hadn't done it at all. "His body was dying – we poisoned him, his body was dying and he tried to use mine. I didn't let him."

He didn't look at Dumbledore, and wouldn't accept his words of praise for finally defeating the enemy Harry shouldn't have known at all. So Dumbledore said, "Harry… I wish you'd told me. Why didn't you come to me for help?"

Harry had learned his lesson, all his life he'd asked permission for things, and all his life he'd tried to tell his aunt and uncle things that only made them angry with him, so Harry had learned to keep his mouth shut, and coming to Hogwarts had been no different. It had been easier to fix the problem and to step into the trap door than convince Minerva McGonagall of the dangers, and it had been easier to enter the Chamber of Secrets than to tell the people that were willing to let Ginny die there, and it had been easier to find Sirius on their own. So Harry had gotten into the habit of never asking for help, and never running to an adult when things became too much, and it had gotten his godfather killed but if he'd told a soul would they have believed him? Or would they have let Sirius die at the end of that hallway? "What choice did I have? Was I supposed to wait for you to handle things while some cracked bastard ran around killing people because of me? There was a problem, I fixed the problem – what else was I supposed to do?"

"If you'd only told me…"

Dumbledore looked pathetic in his eyes, sad and twisted, not the worried, kind old man he'd come to know but a thing that had taken everything away from him and had no way of putting it back. Dumbledore had never trusted him, dragging him into his office to ask if he were a death eater and watching him suspiciously for anything at all out of the ordinary, completely unlike years previously, and the entire time having no faith. Harry hadn't told him, or wouldn't tell him because he never had before, and it had always seemed to work, because Dumbledore couldn't have helped him or wouldn't have – the headmaster would have patted him on the head and told him to forget about it, forget revenge for his best friend, forget living normally until the adults had things sorted out, and Harry didn't trust him to sort out anything. "You thought I was a death eater!"

"Harry… you have to understand, because of your close association with Mister Malfoy we had to assume that…" Harry overrode him at that point, furious with himself for not having the energy to scream at the headmaster. He wanted to lay all of the man's faults at Dumbledore's feet, wanted to expose him for the fraud and the bastard he was, but could barely muster the strength of will to form a sentence.

"Actions should speak louder than any alliances." He said heavily, breathing hard with the exertion, "I am not allied with you, or with the death eaters, or with anybody else and the only reason I started working with Malfoy was… convenience. But while you were playing war games with a bunch of ministry big wigs, we were killing Voldemort, and something tells me that's more important."

"You're right of course, and I'm sorry, but we had no way of knowing… we had to take certain precautions…"

"He killed my parents!" Voldemort could have volunteered every weekend at the Sunshine and Happiness Foundation for the Betterment of Lost Youth and he would still be in Harry's bad books.

"I know, I'm sorry Harry, I really am, I just wish you'd trusted me enough to tell me."

"But I don't trust you" Harry said with finality, the first perfectly clear statement since he'd woken up, said completely without wheezing. "And part of me hates you."

"I'm so sorry Harry…"

"You messed everything up." Harry didn't want an apology, it was far too late and extraordinarily meaningless. "Right at the start you messed everything up – you should've been their secret keeper, and even after that you shouldn't have left me with the Dursleys, and you should've helped Sirius because you know damned well that Peter Petigrew told Voldemort because you cast the spell to keep them hidden in the first place, and Sirius never had a dark mark, you should have looked!" Dumbledore sighed, and nodded slowly, and the bile in Harry's throat burned him as he stared the headmaster down angrily and squeezed the weight on his left hand because it was all he could do – everything this man had ever done for him was only an attempt to alleviate his guilt and Harry knew it. Harry hated him for it. "You did everything wrong."

"Sometimes Harry… we're only human."

"Human is apparently not good enough." Harry clenched his jaw against any further apology and tried to cross his arms, his statement ringing with hypocrisy, but he'd be damned if he would take it back.

"I'm sorry, Harry. I'm sorry."

"Just tell me," Harry said coldly, it had been plaguing him for months and now that everything had ended he could ask without fear of cosmic retribution. Cosmic retribution had been exacted, and Harry had survived, he figured he was owed the answer to his question. "What did you do with the philosopher's stone?"

Dumbledore smiled cleverly which Harry had no patience for and the smile fell off his face, "It's in my grandmother's milk jug, in my office, the one with the blue and yellow daisy pattern."

"You incredible bastard." Harry said lightly, blinking away layers of mirth and frustration, as he thought of all the trouble they'd gone to, the adaptations they'd had to make to spells and poisons and the sheer frustration of banging your head against a wall until someone presented a second viable option and it was in Dumbledore's milk jug all along. He could kill the man, or laugh, or cry, and was sorely tempted to attempt all three. "Why didn't you destroy it when you had the chance? I corrupted a magical relic of infinite value because I couldn't find that stone, and all along it was sitting in your grandmother's milk jug?"

"You didn't corrupt anything Harry." Dumbledore did his best to look reassuring, and Harry wasn't having it. It wasn't about the Bacchus flute, or anything to that effect, it wasn't about what he'd done in order to achieve his goals, it was the simple fact that what he'd needed was hiding in plain sight and he was kicking himself for it. Too angry and too wrought with exhaustion to rationalize the impulse to throttle something, he was taking it out on Dumbledore. "The poison will work its way out eventually."

"I tainted it!" He snapped, "Whether the poison remains or not, I took gold and I turned it into brass to murder a man – I tainted it."

Dumbledore took on that old familiar look that suggested he was about to say something profound and Harry didn't think he could listen to a statement that would bore into his skull and echo around the dusty corridors of his mind. His heart hurt too much for any revelations. "Harry, something as… _made _as a Bacchus flute is tainted from its inception. Men will start wars over it, spill blood for its use, scar it, taint it, use it for purposes far more nefarious than the eradication of evil. You haven't destroyed anything."

"You still haven't answered my question." Harry said it perfectly reasonably, a hairsbreadth from causing an explosion, he was hurting, and far be it from Dumbledore to spot a metaphor when smacked in the face with it. Yes, the Bacchus Flute was a made thing, a tool used in sowing the seeds of power, corrupt from its inception – and so was he. "Why didn't you destroy the Philosopher's stone?" Why did you force me to use a lesser substitute.

"Destroying it would have been… unwise." Harry snorted to show his opinion of that sentiment, but waited for the explanation he knew would follow. "Once a thing is unmade its secrets are revealed – it can be recreated, in another place perhaps, in another time, but recreated nevertheless. The existence of two Philosopher's stones may have been catastrophic."

"I'm not sure I understand."

"A thing done once may never be repeated. But a thing done twice will surely be done a third time. Better to have the solitary stone as it is, hidden and harmless, than to see several in the world. I couldn't let that happen – I couldn't let wars be started and more lives lost, so I hid it away, and the Philosopher's stone can never bother another soul."

"Except for mine." Harry slumped back against his pillows, blinking away the stinging tears that threatened to spill out of his eyes and he stared the headmaster down. "I should never have had to do any of it."

Dumbledore left without a word, and Harry fell back into the restful oblivion of sleep.

* * *

"You look like shit Potter." Draco said the next time Harry opened his eyes, and he realized that it had been Malfoy all along that was the pressure at his left hand.

"Can't be any paler than you." Harry mumbled, taking in the white of his skin and the pale hair, featureless and angelic without his glasses, and was rewarded by a rich laugh.

"The Bastard drugged me." Only one Bastard deserved a capital B, and that was Malfoy all over, spitting mad and scowling at the world at large; he'd been there ages, Harry had felt the constant tension on his skin, the constant rubbing of circles around the base of his thumb and couldn't muster the energy to marvel. "He came in here to talk to you, and he put me to sleep because he thought I'd interfere."

"Would you have?" Harry smiled and realized his teeth could use a scouring with a good old-fashioned tooth brush; Madam Pomfrey had been using cleansing charms. Malfoy had the grace to look abashed, he always interfered, it was one of his better qualities and Harry amused himself by thinking what he would have said to keep even the Headmaster at bay. Sitting up was agony, his toes curled, and his back spasmed, and his elbows screamed at the weight he put on them, but Harry was happier to be in agony than to be floating in that half-alive place where he'd seen his best friends. "You look tired."

"Unlike you, Mister I-can-sleep-for-three-weeks-and-worry-everyone-sick." He was snide when he said it, and Harry laughed feeling that this was all a dream, and Malfoy with circles under his eyes, and see-through-sarcasm was a figment of his increasingly bizarre imagination.

"I've beaten my record then."

"You almost died you daft…" Draco couldn't finish his sentence and looked away. Harry had died, more than once and each time they'd managed to bring him back he'd suffered the quiet statement from Dumbledore that Harry may not ever come back as Harry and that Draco should just get on with it and tell him exactly what he knew pending a trial of the Wizengamot for the murder of Harry Potter. And every time Draco would refuse to move and mutter disconsolately about Harry telling him to bugger off when he woke up, and not leaving before then. "You almost died."

"It's happened before." Said Harry, and he sat silently while Draco peeled himself away from the stiff bed-side chair and sat on the edge of Harry's bed so Harry could see him without turning his head. He didn't ask what happened, he knew he'd find out eventually, that Hermione at any moment would come bursting through the door seeing he was awake and coherent and bludgeon him into submission with stories of his own heroism that Harry didn't quite recall. Hermione the bludger. "Do I still have it?"

"Your scar?"

"Yes." Harry couldn't feel it. Since he'd come to Hogwarts it had been a constant presence, somewhere in his mind was Ginny Weasley exclaiming over him and Molly saying "oh no wonder he was so polite." And there was the constant presence of eyes on his skull, open stares and later the discrete glances when his year mates learned that he wasn't going anywhere and wondered how the hell something as mediocre as Harry Potter managed to survive as a child. Yes his scar, that he couldn't feel at the moment, and had asked about, and the scar that Malfoy wasn't looking at at all because he simply knew having sat and watched in silence.

"Yes." Harry's hands flew to his forehead, feeling the familiar and ancient irregularity in the strange and ridiculous shape that he'd come to hate. Still there, still prominent, a silver line against his normal skin. He had other scars that wouldn't disappear, had other injuries from things he shouldn't, like the one at his shoulder from the basilisk that pulled every time he reached for the snitch.

"Damn." He said, knowing that if it were ordinary then it would disappear over time, or find itself lost in wrinkly folds as he approached Dumbledore's age, and also knowing that even age and wrinkles and the frown lines he would develop would only serve to enhance it. "You still have the…" He didn't finish his sentence, choosing instead to gesture with his nose, because it seemed easier.

Malfoy rolled up his sleeve and gave his inner elbow to Harry for inspection, which the Gryffindor boy ran his fingers over, tracing projectile vomit of a snake and holding his thumbs over the burnished silver image that had burned and iced over when Voldemort died. "It will never go away."

Harry laughed and fell away backwards into his pillows, tired beyond all comprehension since he'd apparently slept so long. Draco was shooting him concerned looks, torn between incredulity at his apparent insanity and worried for his health, which only made Harry laugh harder. "Oh all the Muggle girls will think you're dashing." And Draco snorted in response. "How is it that you get a metallic tattoo and I feel like I've had my appendix removed?"

"Because I'm a Malfoy." Draco paused to smirk, and sighed as Harry's fingers stilled against the raised mark. It burned white hot, then cold and stayed that way until he could imagine that it was cold to the touch, so icy it could freeze his fingertip off, yet here was Harry Potter, doing the unthinkable and holding that horribly stigmatized skin beneath his fingertips. He reached out, and it wasn't much of a reach sitting as he was near Harry's elbow, tracing the jagged line of Harry's scar. Draco had watched it bleed, seen Harry grit his teeth against it in his sleep and hadn't touched it, couldn't run his fingers across it until he was sure it could be warm to the touch, and it was. "And you have had your appendix removed."

Harry chuckled wetly, his elbows made the attempt to push him off the bed just as his shoulders lunged forwards away from the mattress trying to pick his pathetic carcass up to face his only remaining nemesis. These actions resulted in a minor disaster as the jangling of nerves and muscles sent pain swirling through him at mind-blowing frequencies. "Ooph." He said, and the mattress once again became a very good friend.

"The press has gone mad." If it weren't so typical of the wizarding world, and had he not been the most-rumored Harry Potter the statement may have been completely out of context.

"Let me guess – Harry Potter is the new Dark Lord, more powerful and nasty than that mean old you-know-who ever was, and we as British citizens would be lucky to have our not-so-awful-after-all evil dictators back?"

If not for the fact that Malfoys never giggle, the sound that Draco made might have been best described as one. "The Prophet tried that out the morning after." Draco nodded differentially to their joint accomplishment and laughed again at the thought. He would have given a substantial amount of galleons (had he still possessed them) to see the Chief Editor's mail slot that afternoon. Purportedly, even Molly Weasley had sent the ridiculous man a howler which had burst into flame and taken up the next morning's review. "Most of them have reached the general consensus that you should be elected Minister of Magic come your seventeenth birthday, and that there ought to be a parade held in your honor. Witch Weekly reports that you, as the world savior and current hero-of-the-hour, should be put on a pedestal, slathered in chocolate sauce, and auctioned off as most eligible bachelor."

This was delivered in perfect deadpan and the only thing that kept Harry from laughing until his sides split was the very real possibility that his sides would split. Still, he choked on raucous laughter until it was too much for his ribs to bear and he lay back with a groan. Malfoy had him by the hand again and Harry found that moving his hand would be a terrible thing. "Oh no." Verbal affirmation of this statement sent him off again, laughing harder. "Ron's mum reads that!"

Malfoy smirked and his eyebrow twitched in amusement, "Who do you think gave me the article?"

Harry blanched sheet white. "And no mention of you?"

Draco scowled darkly and threaded his fingers through Harry's, "They mentioned me." Was all he said, but all the same Harry had the niggling suspicion that he would be reading these articles and setting stories straight for some time. Draco Malfoy was perpetually Draco _Malfoy_, and therefore not worthy of common human courtesy in the eyes of the press – evil son of a Death Eater and firmly steeped in dark magic etcetera etcetera until the world fell down.

Members of the press that were very fortunately not in the Hospital wing at the moment were spared the fury of Harry's glare at the hovering vulture society of reporters. "Tell me about the Quibbler." He said, and the thought of Luna's not-so-reputable father took his mind off things. It was far too early (3pm) to be glowering.

"The estimable Doctor Lovegood," here he stopped and had to compose himself because the thought of the singular distracted article in the midst of crumple-horned snorkaks and Herclorkians was too much to bear, "Has in no uncertain terms stated that you, again world savior and current hero-of-the-hour, are a seraphim and therefore possibly not subject to a First Class Merlin award given your not-quite-human biology and magical prowess." Harry laughed until he cried and Draco made wry comments about "so much for not being interested in your own press."

"Well, you know how I adore being made an ass." Sometime in the violent gesticulating of Draco Malfoy's speech their hands had settled on his knee but neither made any move to dislodge the too-comfortable placement.

"If I'd known, I would have hexed you with donkey ears. I just thought you were trying to get my attention."

"Hey!" Harry said teasingly, going for mock indignation and only managing brattiness, "I'll have you know that I've seen the other side – I know the secrets of the universe, I am well and truly mystic now – and I don't think I'd look good with donkey ears."

"Saints preserve us," said Draco with care, happy but wincing at Harry's casual dismissal of his actual death. Harry Potter was the only person to have survived the killing curse, and now he'd done it twice – Draco had killed his best friend and they were now chatting amicably about donkey ears. He was so happy it hurt, so relieved and the breath he'd been holding siphoned out in an ecstatic hiss when Harry had his first lucid moment in weeks. "You're channeling Trelawney."

"Hardly. The day I start wearing shawls and begin floating around Gryffindor tower is the day you have permission to kill me." Harry snorted, dead though she was he had no respect for the woman that had essentially ruined his life. Stupid prophecies made at stupid times leading even stupider people to kill his parents followed by an entire career of blundering idiocy and denial of the real prophecy that might have saved the life of his godfather – sequined shawls and rhinestone glasses certainly had a lot of work to do. "But if you rub my head I might see clear to telling you that the gate keeper is really Ron Weasley and the afterlife is really a bunch of white candy floss."

"All the more reason to avoid it then…. I hate candy floss."

"But you're allowed to curse in heaven – that's something. Ron's mum would've boxed his ears if she'd been there." Draco was rubbing his head and Harry was suddenly, infinitely glad that he hadn't died. "I kept seeing Hagrid in my dreams."

"Well that's hardly a surprise, once he figured out where you were he came by every day." Draco didn't register the shock on Harry's face as he gave a delicate little shudder, "May I never be forced to eat a stoat sandwich again."

Harry's fingernails dug into Draco's arms, pinching him violently "I thought Hagrid was dead!"

There had been a lot of that sort of misunderstanding occurring recently, and Draco didn't bother to mention the half-dozen other people that had popped up alive after their parents and the world had been informed of their deaths. The death eaters had been a complex group, and their allies were unreliable at best, survivors of the war that hadn't quite begun were far outweighed by the dead, but they were there, and Hagrid was among them. "He lost communications, it took him months to find us again, and when he did he was in pretty bad shape. He told me he came in about two days after we'd gone to face the dark lord."

"And the first thing he made you do was eat a stoat sandwich?" Harry laughed, smiled and gently soothed the area that his fingernails had bitten into with the pads of his hands. "I'm not sure who I feel more sorry for."

Draco was silent for a while, enjoying the stupid conversation in a whole new way, and he hoped eventually that the feeling would wear off. The relief hurt too much. "I… we weren't sure how you were going to wake up." Harry stared at him blankly, the apparent non sequitur having thrown him off guard. But Draco had been frightened – for three weeks the body of Harry Potter had been completely still after his final confrontation with Voldemort and no one was really sure who would be in there if he did open his eyes. There were some factions that were insisting they kill his body before either soul had the opportunity to reawaken, because Voldemort was evil, and Harry had the potential to be a thousand times worse. "Whether it would be you, or him."

"What happened anyway?" That seemed like a reasonable question, and Harry hated reasonable questions – he wanted to get back to talking about silly things, and not facing the real world. He remembered his version of events quite clearly, incredible pain, more incredible pain, and finally nothing but incredible pain, but what it must have been like to an outsider – the war for his body, he wanted Draco to tell him. He didn't want to _know, _precisely, what he'd done, or what had happened to everyone in the clearing, or how they'd gotten back, or any of the details, but at the same time he needed Draco to tell him. Needed to know everything, and needed Malfoy not to go slumping off into brooding silences and leaving him alone. He wondered for a moment if this was how Ron felt when he locked himself inside his head, and apologized to his late friend. Lying: "I don't remember too much… not past the poison."

"Well that didn't work, obviously." Harry snorted, Draco gave him a smile, "I told you it was a stupid idea. Voldemort drank and… it hurt, I could feel it. He was spreading the pain, everybody with a mark could feel it – and… do you remember the circle?"

"Yeah…" Harry had gone white remembering, and Draco didn't want to say any more. "I remember."

"When it was my turn… I had to try something, it was horrible and I had to do something because you were screaming and I didn't want you to hurt… so I cast the killing curse."

"Not very well."

"I… I know it hit you, and it should have worked I just…." Draco laughed at himself, his statement was tantamount to admitting to the attempted murder of Harry Potter, and Harry just lifted an eyebrow and gave him a smartass comment like it didn't matter, and maybe it didn't. Draco was just so damned glad it was Harry in there and not something else, and then the guilt came back. "It could've gone on for hours and I couldn't…"

"Thank you."

Draco blinked, and blinked again when Harry looked at him so sincerely. Thank you for trying to kill me, I really appreciate it. It hurt, damned near killed him because Harry was sincere and his heart was doing it's best to split itself apart and spill out onto the bedsheets. "Voldemort's body just fell and… you were screaming and I tried to get to you but I blacked out, I could feel him die – and… I guess the Death Eater's went with him. Madam Pomfrey told me, I didn't know. I guess there were reports of loyal Death Eaters all over the world just falling over dead – Severus, by the way, is just fine, though I hear he did not appreciate the headache."

Harry chuckled dryly and Draco launched more firmly into the ramifications of their actions. Neither man had expected to survive the encounter with Voldemort, and having done so were suddenly dealing with the fall out – Harry thought it would be easier if they could apparate to an island in the Bahamas and let things sort themselves out. "All but six of the marked death eaters died. We didn't know it but Aurors had the lot all staked out, ready to move in but when you showed up… they didn't know what to do, and then people started collapsing and they transferred everyone left alive to the ministry cells."

Except for Harry. Harry had been given over to St. Mungo's for emergency treatment – his recent behavior was not public knowledge because there were no students like Draco Malfoy around to spread the news, and so he was given the best treatment available, healed and restored until he could be shipped back to Hogwarts. The staff had been appalled at his general state of health and Albus Dumbledore had subsequently received quite the verbal beating from Madam Pomfrey that half the school bore witness to. Draco, unfortunately was not among that half.

He had woken up in a cell where there was no magic and it felt like being in a vacuum, he couldn't breathe. Peter Petigrew was on the cot beside his, watching him in his twitchy sort of way and Draco had exerted all of his control to restrain himself from strangling the man with his bare hands. They had a conversation, the contents of which would never be repeated to Harry, and Dumbledore had arrived in the morning to bail him out – Cornelius Fudge had not been pleased. The Minister thought of Malfoy's imprisonment as a feather in his cap, with the exception of Draco, the Malfoy line had ended with Lucius and Cornelius considered that a great victory against the conservative dark side. Half an hour after his release, Cornelius Fudge had retired dramatically.

Draco was returned to Hogwarts and admitted to the hospital wing where Madam Pomfrey fussed and bustled and generally made recovery from a wash of dark magic a living hell because he wouldn't leave Harry's side and she'd eventually just given him a pair of pyjamas and a bed that he never actually used. "You should know – Peter Petigrew is looking to stand trial as soon as you're fit to testify."

"Oh." Harry didn't have much more to say on the subject, though a long string of curses sprang to mind. According to Draco all loyal Death Eaters had died in the backwash, which could only mean one thing, and Harry didn't care. Harry wanted Peter to rot, wanted him to sit in Azkaban and regret everything he'd ever done right up from birth – the Dementor's kiss was too kind, his wand deserved to be broken, and he deserved the rest of his life in hopeless reflection. He didn't say.

"Harry… how he died – it doesn't make sense."

There was no explanation for it as yet, some time in the future minds like Hermione Granger's would probably write dissertations on the death of the Dark Lord – but Harry thought he knew. Voldemort had been so concerned with siphoning off the pain that when Draco struck him with the killing curse the link between them was ripped wide open and Voldemort was dragged in. Harry could feel when it had happened, and how desperately he'd tried to cling to the pain because it was real, and Voldemort had taken Harry's moment of weakness to transfer his soul from his dying body to the strongest link it had available. Harry's. It never would have worked if not for the distraction of the poison, and the distraction of Harry himself, when Voldemort's body died it was sheer chance and minor miracle that Harry had survived. He remembered the blinding pain, remembered a ball of light, remembered feeling like he was on fire and then there was nothing – and the backwash of such a gigantic magical eruption had apparently knocked out everyone else with a link to him. He said as much and Malfoy nodded along as though it made sense. "Is that why you were worried? Because it didn't make sense?"

"Yes." It was cruel, and not the way that Harry Potter Miracles worked, but it was the way the world worked. The experienced wizard went into a duel with everything he had and tended to obliterate the novice – that Harry had apparently woken up in the place of the Dark Lord was astounding. "It was too easy."

"It wasn't easy." Harry's voice was cold, and he remembered. It hadn't been easy at all, it hurt, it was excruciating in places he didn't know existed. Painful in mind, body, and soul. Like the floodgates had opened up and the vague trickle of information he had been receiving from Voldemort in the past was suddenly a deluge, flooding him, melting his brain and leaving scorch marks across his thoughts and memories. In the end though, the body was his – no matter how many times he'd threatened to leave it or it had given out on him the body was his, and he knew that. Voldemort only thought it, and Harry knew – so Harry kept it. "It was a risk, they should have killed me."

Draco's heart lurched. "I said no."

"Why?"

"Because. The next time you die, it's going to be because I killed you – I can't let have some stupid Dark Lord taking the credit."

"Oh well, as long as your reasons were entirely selfish."

Harry was laughing at him, and Draco felt… good. Not relief, because he was flooded in relief he simply felt good. Harry was laughing at him, and Draco was laughing with him like there was an inside joke that he didn't entirely understand but appreciated anyway. "You realize if you ever die again, I'm going to make your afterlife an un-living hell, yes?"

Harry snorted and wrapped his thin fingers around Draco's wrist, flopping backwards into his pillows. It was over, he had the memories, everything from Tom Riddle's very first step was locked inside his head, but it was over. He had his life back, he could breathe again – and while he had a lot of ground to make up, and a lot of work lay ahead of him, and he still had to take the end of the year exams but he had the time to do it in, and that made all the difference in the world. He didn't have to feel guilty over all the deaths he hadn't yet caused, and maybe it had been too easy. Maybe Malfoy could help him study for his exams, he was good at that sort of thing. "I love you too, pillock."

The End.


End file.
